Open bmiller59 opened 4 years ago
kemitchell
commented
4 years ago Some of your thoughts prompted a blog post: https://writing.kemitchell.com/2020/02/10/Universal-Share-Alike-Data.html
In particular reference to your third question about readable licenses: Have you read the current draft of Universal? If not, I suspect you'll find it far easier than you expect.
bmiller59
commented
4 years ago Thanks for your in-depth consideration of these questions! I appreciate it. I will review carefully and follow up with any additional questions/issues.
bmiller59
commented
4 years ago Your blog post was dense with useful information and distinctions, so it took a little while to digest it all. :wink:. The discussions of the roles of license vs contract and copyright vs trade secret were especially helpful.
I had two more follow up questions related to the sharing terms of this license, as applied to a hypothetical decentralized or federated social media platform. (If it helps you to evaluate, you could consider how this license would affect posts on a platform like Mastodon or Matrix/Riot.)
On such a system, it seems pretty clear that "posts" from users would meet the definition of creative works and thus need to be Shared-Alike.
The terms for sharing state
Publish the work, in the preferred forms for use and making changes, through a freely accessible distribution system widely used for similar work so others can find and copy it.
What are "preferred forms" and could/should these be explicitly stated in the license?
What constitutes a "freely accessible distribution system?"
In the context of a social media platform, it would be most consistent with the license if the posts created had to be accessible to any user of the platform (e.g. accessible and ingestible by the federated platform servers), as opposed to shared on some "walled garden" derivative version of the software where it may be visible to only select humans behind a separate login, for example.
Thanks for any further thoughts on how to ensure sharing in a manner and format consistent with the way the software was designed to operate.
kemitchell
commented
4 years ago The phrase "preferred forms" is meant stop licensees from arguably meeting the requirements of the license by publishing a compiled binary of software, just the master track exported from a DAW session, a rendered PDF of a novel written in Markdown, and so on. We need the format that's best for other makers, not just the format that's good for consumers.
The phrase "freely accessible distribution system" is meant to identify the place where creators of similar content usually go looking for work they can share, change, and build on. For example, public GitHub is a freely accessible distribution system widely used for software source code.
Those phrases come from prior strong-copyleft licenses, like Parity and API Copyleft, where the work being published is always source code. Since Universal goes broader than that, it may actually be worthwhile to include some examples. On the downside, that could end up adding substantial length. We should also expect that the "go-to" distribution systems will change over time, and make clear that examples provided aren't the only right answers for all time.
Thank you for this license. I have several interlinked questions about the use of this license. If there is a better forum to address these questions, feel free to let me know and I will repost there. If this is the right place, perhaps these questions can help to inform some future work. I am developer, not a lawyer, but hopefully my questions at the bottom of this document can lead to something interesting.
Growing the digital commons
The key goal I am pursuing is to grow a new digital commons. This document will lay out some of the apparently unresolved licensing challenges that need to be resolved to develop a license/licensing regime to achieve that aim.
For reference, here is a definition of the commons from the dictionary: "belonging equally to an entire community; public." For the purposes of this discussion, "community" means the global community (all of humanity).
For a global digital commons to be meaningful, it needs to cover the software and source code as well as the data over which that software operates. (It may need to also cover the hardware that powers it.) Motivation for these assertions is provided below.
Software
The software part of this is perhaps the most clear at this point: the only software licenses that are compatible with the ideal/goal of a living, breathing commons are copyleft licenses. Without copyleft provisions, it would be possible for the good work of commons-minded developers to be adapted for proprietary uses without those modifications also coming back into the commons. The result would be that the commons would start to wither and die.
Going further, as more and more software is deployed/hosted on servers or offered as software-as-a-service, it is important that copyleft software license terms apply not only to locally installed software, but to also hosted software. This means that networked software should be licensed under network-aware terms, such as the Affero GPL.
Data
But what about the data? The content and data over which the software operates must also continually be added into the commons. The details of what that means will be explored below.
For example, consider a copyleft social network with functionality similar to Facebook. What would be required to ensure that such a social network continued to grow and enrich the commons with the content and data from all of its users in perpetuity?
Here are a few possible requirements to codify or ensure in the license:
Note: New licenses like the Cryptographic Autonomy License are also addressing issues related to data, but do not address the challenge of building a data commons.
Hardware
To create a practically useful and accessible commons, it is also important to consider the hardware that the software runs on. While some parts of a web-connected application may reside on a user's mobile device, computer, or in their browser, large portions will need to run on properly and adequately provisioned servers.
Here are some possible hardware requirements for a supportive license:
Crafting the license
Some questions:
1) Can these aims be achieved through a suitable license, either this license, an adaptation of it, or a new license?
2) Should the legal provisions to achieve this goal of growing a strong and vital commons best be contained in a stand-alone license covering all requirements, or would it be better to adopt a "modular" structure of compatible provisions that could be layered on top of existing copyleft licenses?\ Something to be considered in answering this question is the choice between widely-adopted licenses (e.g. GPL and AGPL) and more special-purpose, "niche" licenses. Are widely-adopted and recognizable licenses, especially those that have been favorably tested in legal proceedings and where precedents have been set preferable? Or are the benefits of a finely-honed, custom license greater?
3) Is there a way to achieve dual goals for the license of being in simple, plain language so that non-lawyers can easily understand the terms, while also simultaneously providing enough detail and explanation that the full implications of the license can be recognized by both lawyers and non-lawyers?
4) I am also interested in ideas I have seen in other licenses that are not directly related to the challenge of growing a commons, such as the Hippocratic License. It seems overly restrictive to include provisions like these in a license designed to grow the commons, but it would also be great if the terms of the Hippocratic License or some variant of it could be layered on top, again in some modular, additive way. Is that possible?
Looking forward to your thoughts on these issues!