Why I Unlicense | Hacker News Reader

Why I Unlicense

kibabase.com

18 pointskiba26 comments

As one of the original authors of the Unlicense, always nice to see yet more people opt out of the copyright racket.

The growing visibility of unlicensing is a good thing what with the copyright industry increasingly running amok. Sometimes things have to get worse before they can get better.

The project list at http://unlicense.org/ could probably use an update sometime soon. Link suggestions are welcome via the mailing list as usual.

Deleted comment

There's currently a lively debate on License-review about OSI certification of CC0. Contention is largely focused on these patent issues. I dig the public domain, but until the courts, legislature, and/or international treaty say otherwise I think these dedications are hazardous to those downstream.

Edit: In reply to (and without attribution) the following deleted message:

  I believe there was commentary relating to unlicense's 
  approach on the OSI's license-discuss list in December. 
  In particular, one legal expert pointed out that you 
  can't open by dedicating your work to the public domain 
  (the 1st line) and then proceed to issue a license for 
  use.

  The CC0 license was held up for an example of how to do a 
  dedication plus fall-back as crafted by someone who has a 
  background in law... but this license explicitly reserves 
  patent rights and is therefore a poor substitute software 
  license (IMHO, IANAL).

  I'd love to see these "public domain statements" also  
  start to include a patent abandonment and/or promise not 
  to patent clause if the full intent is to be completely 
  free.

I've used Unlicense before, but I have since been persuaded that this was a mistake. Frankly, I think that unlicense inadequately protects user freedom. It does not contain a patent grant or estoppel. While I don't care about attribution, the disruption of provenance is problematic. I should hope that there are few companies interested in shipping code that, as far as they can tell, fell off the back of a truck.

Suppose that Foo Corp releases Unlicensed code that includes patented material. Baz Ltd goes on to develop a widget that uses Foo's code. Later on, Bar Inc buys Foo Corp and files suit against Baz.

No disrespect meant to Arto, but he simply isn't a intellectual property attorney. (Edit: And neither am I.)

While I don't care about attribution, the disruption of provenance is problematic.

Heard that loudly and clearly several time in this thread.

Suppose that Foo Corp releases Unlicensed code that includes patented material. Baz Ltd goes on to develop a widget that uses Foo's code. Later on, Bar Inc buys Foo Corp and files suit against Baz.

Good point. The problem only exists because patent exists.

The point is that copyright dedications are not licenses. Therefore, if you want to submarine someone... do a copyright dedication (but don't grant patent rights). Wait till your "public domain" work is broadly adopted, then sue. Or, conversely, if you want to get sued... use works in the public domain where the person doing the dedication hasn't also granted patent license.

At least if you use a standard MIT license there may be an "equitable estoppel through acquiescence" in which the copyright holder might not be able to sue you for patent infringement since the MIT license said you could use the work.

It's better to use the Apache 2.0 license which includes a patent grant, though.

Why not CC-BY? I see attribution is something that protects the rights of consumers (by preserving the provenance chain) as much as it protects the rights of producers.

Personally I find myself going the other way. I see many free data products in the semantic web space that are only marginally succeeding, and a lot of it is that, without the profit motive, the people involved don't have a motivation to do the fit-and-finish work that's necessary for people to pick the product up and actually use it. I'd rather be working with a few people who really want the product and prove that they want it by paying for it, rather than dealing with a huge number of uncommitted people.

Why not CC-BY? I see attribution is something that protects the rights of consumers (by preserving the provenance chain) as much as it protects the rights of producers.

I want my work to spread as widely as possible. Sometime when your work get remixed so much that it doesn't make sense that somebody should preserve attribution.

You still want more dedicated customers. The way to get a lot of those people is to be well known. Whether or not you are able to filter them is another matter.

This article isn't arguing against high price. To me, getting paid for dead tree copies of your book is the very definition of charging a leg and an arm because they COULD read it for free on the internet.

> without the profit motive, the people involved don't have a motivation to do the fit-and-finish work that's necessary for people to pick the product up and actually use it

This is true for most open source projects, but not all. For instance, Linux is of extremely high quality. Largely because there is a profit motive for many people.

However, all is not lost. I can't tell you the number of times I picked up an open source project. Forked it, cleaned it up, added features, and put it into production. That's the real power of open source.

I don't understand this bit: Under both system of copyright and copyfree work, J. K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series of book, became a billionaire

JK Rowling became a billionaire through licensing her characters to film-makers, toy-makers, etc. a method that is totally dependent on intellectual property.

Am I missing something?

Thanks for spotting an error. What I really meant is that J. K. Rowling would probably earn a lot of money either way, even if not with such ludicrous rent. I updated the text to reflect what I actually mean.

Sounds like "The Free Music Philosophy": http://ram.org/ramblings/philosophy/fmp.html

Different types of creative work may deserve a different treatment. (The same people who want copyright protection reduced to 5 years max probably haven't thought through the GPL implications!)

Imagine you wrote a truly great short story. Straight up copyright might be optimal. It'll get copied around regardless. Encouraging derivative works probably doesn't buy you much. And CC-BY seems as low as you'd want to go. Anything less, and Hollywood just gobbles it up and nobody sees your name on the poster. This goes against your strategy of "getting known by getting copied."

Also, times change. Musicians who license songs CC-BY-NC are free options in the Vimeo music service that offers background tracks to video creators. Meanwhile, old-school artists are one click away from actually getting paid. And public domain music seems deeply buried in the archive.org ghetto. So choose carefully, grasshopper.

License choice is part of modern web marketing. But it's a short-term bump and nobody knows the long-term effects. Also: if the most interesting part of your art is the license, you're doing it wrong.

The same people who want copyright protection reduced to 5 years max probably haven't thought through the GPL implications!

Many have, including RMS himself:

I could support a law that would make GPL-covered software's source code available in the public domain after 5 years, provided it has the same effect on proprietary software's source code. After all, copyleft is a means to an end (users' freedom), not an end in itself. And I'd rather not be an advocate for a stronger copyright.

So I proposed that the Pirate Party platform require proprietary software's source code to be put in escrow when the binaries are released. The escrowed source code would then be released in the public domain after 5 years. Rather than making free software an official exception to the 5-year copyright rule, this would eliminate proprietary software's unofficial exception. Either way, the result is fair.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pirate-party.html

Good points. I should addresses some of these concern in the future.

However, people tend to attribute you anyway, 99% of the time, in my experience. I got one guy who published a book on amazon and he attributed my work anyway, even though it was copyrighted to the max. One guy just attributed the author, but not the zine. I didn't find anybody who doesn't attribute my content in some way, at least not yet.

The other reasons why I make my stuff public domain is that I want to maximize the usefulness of my work as well ethical reasons. However, these are not explored in the article. Maybe I shouldn't have neglect those dimensions, but I am not quite sure yet.

Indeed. Those who are going to attribute you will attribute you anyway, without needing a gun held to their head about it. Those who won't, won't.

Many of these concerns are addressed in Peter Saint-Andre's essay "Who's Afraid of the Public Domain?":

http://stpeter.im/writings/essays/publicdomain.html

I've always contemplated doing this, but as I understand it, public domain isn't recognized internationally, and therefore anything you release to the public domain can later be copyrighted by someone else in those non-recognizing regions. Can anyone who is more well-informed weigh in on this?

Public domain is ambiguous in some countries: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/219742/open-source-why-no...

There are ways to work around this such as what SQLite does (public domain + explicit license to anyone who asks): http://www.sqlite.org/copyright.html

and CC0: http://creativecommons.org/choose/zero/

The CC0 is currently under an license-review discussion at the OSI. The CC0 explicitly excludes patent rights from the permission and therefore may not be a great choice for a free software license.

That is why the Unlicense is designed to be treated as a license as a fall-back strategy (inspired by the Creative Commons Zero public-domain dedication). More particulars at:

http://ar.to/2010/01/dissecting-the-unlicense

On the OSI's license-discuss list in December it was noted that the unlicense dedication statement is not well formed and could use the assistance/review of a legal professional.

However, to gain a reputation so that one would be able to earn a living is the conundrum that every entertainment entrepreneur must face.

One person who solved this conundrum is the author behind The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho.

I don't get it. Paulo Coelho was already well known in '99. Two of his books were already bestsellers in Brazil and "in 1993, HarperCollins published 50,000 copies of the book, which was the largest ever initial print run of a Brazilian book in the United States."

Like Jason Rohrer, he gained his reputation before starting to distribute his novels for free.

Jason Rohrer gains his reputation through previous works, just like the author behind The Alchemist.

Why not just use the shorter, largely-equivalent and already used ISC license rather than creating yet another one?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISC_license

Two reasons: the ISC license isn't public domain and I didn't create the Unlicense.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com