Default license for toots?
Erik Moeller PublicSeen by 52
When you talk about a default, that suggests people could post content with a more restrictive license if they chose to. What effect would those restrictively licensed posts have on social.coop's status as a free culture project? Would those posts pose a barrier to the creation of backups/mirrors?
I think it would be appropriate, at least for starters, for us to agree on a reasonable license to use collectively.
One other option that could be a bit more fun is the Peer Production License, which grants only co-ops the right to use our content. However, that might be more restrictive than we might like.
Anyway, how would other Mastodon users who see a boosted toot from one of us even know our license arrangement? Seems tricky.
I think granting only co-ops the right to use content would be too restrictive. I post on mastodon as myself, not as a spokesperson of the co-op. So I wouldn't be able to boost your toot.
Perhaps our approach could be to choose a default license and announce it to the fediverse, with periodic reminders. We could ask other instances to choose their own defaults. As other instances start to have that conversation, we will find out if a de-facto default becomes generally accepted, so that we can say that we assume instances which have not declared have adopted the de-facto default. Or, instances adopt different licenses, in which case we will have opened up a conversation with the rest of the fediverse, which is a good start to finding a solution.
That's a really interested question, @erikmoeller5!
Could you create a Loomio poll with all the licensing options you can think of, and with the option for folks to add additional options? I think that would be a good way to take a temp check of the membership as to what sort of licensing situation(s) significant numbers of folks would prefer. That way we could identify the most supported options, then have a more in-depth discussion...
No clue, I always assume mine to be public domain unless they are direct messages to someone... Good question though!
Unfortunately nothing is in the public domain unless explicitly designated to be so, or if it hapens to be so trivial as to be uncopyrightable (e.g., an image of a circle on white background). Otherwise copyright applies -- thanks to industry lobbies, it is effectively infinite for most practical purposes (death of the author + 70 years).
identi.ca, for those who remember, used the Creative Commons Attribution License by default, basically meaning in our case that you'd still have to credit the author of a toot, and ensure that the license itself is mentioned in an appropriate location.
This would seem like a potential sensible choice to me, but a poll may indeed be useful! Will wait a bit for more comments and then try to put something together.
I think an explicit position would be really positive. I asked a question in the #introductions thread about the etiquette of posting mastodon content outside of mastodon: https://social.coop/@keith/1277704 I've also asked a couple of people directly for permission to share content. The feeling I've got is that people assume that public posts are shareable. The most common suggestion was to share the link to the toot, which I think would comply with cc-by. However, I'm not totally comfortable with following my feeling on this as I don't want to infringe fellow co-op members' copyright.
Hmmm…Personally I would suggest CC BY-NC-SA as a default.
We could put it in the terms of service and encourage members to put their preferred license in their bios. I suppose it's possible that, if there's demand, down the road it could become an option in Mastodon proper?
I've made a thread on Discourse for other people to weigh in on, please feel free to share.
Yes, BY-NC-SA seems like a good idea to me as well. Should anyone see the need to change it on the fly for one single post they can always specify the licence "in-toot" so to say.
I feel strongly that a Free Culture certified license would be in the communities' best interest:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definition_of_Free_Cultural_Works
https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/freeworks/
Regarding default vs. collective license, the main challenge is that toots may contain creative content that is not the user's own work, or that the user is not prepared to freely license. The former use case can probably be addressed by creating a "fair use" exemption within the social.coop terms of use, while the latter use case may be addressed with in-toot licensing notices as appropriate, as Michael suggests.
Regarding the default license, I would suggest using the Share-Alike but not the non-commercial provision. Share-Alike protects against exploitation (by commercial or non-commercial projects) by ensuring that re-users must make modifications freely available. It targets behavior (exploitative vs. commons-friendly) rather than assuming that some class of entity/use is automatically good vs. bad.
In contrast, restrictions against "fields of endeavor" are generally viewed as incompatible with definitions of free software, open source, free culture, including every single one of these:
https://opensource.org/osd-annotated
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html
https://www.debian.org/social_contract
https://freedomdefined.org/ (co-authored by yours truly and the foundation of Wikimedia's licensing policy)
Creative Commons licenses, too, refer to the freedomdefined.org definition as "approved for free cultural works", which excludes the NC license. See for example the license page here:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
As a result, including such a restriction creates instant incompatibility with free culture projects which cannot incorporate works that have such a restriction (e.g., Wikimedia wikis and many others that have adopted similar terms). Whatever one's view on the merits of NC provisions, this incompatibility is a pragmatic reality.
More than a decade ago, I wrote this, which is a bit more in-depth on the problems with the "NC" restriction:
https://freedomdefined.org/Licenses/NC
In sum, I would favor either the public domain or a share-alike license as the default. Given that toots may include more elaborate creative works, I would lean towards share-alike (CC-BY-SA, Wikipedia's license) as the option most compatible with our goal of being inclusive -- public domain may be a turn-off for some folks who rely on attribution and copyleft.
Thanks—I hadn't realized the problems with NC, your explanation makes sense.
I think this would be something worth adding it as a feature in Mastodon (see mockup), and pushing the fediverse to support it as a field in the federation protocol.
This comes pretty close to the way I imagined the "per toot" licencing function
I want this! Where do we stand on this?
I think we certainly have the financial ability to sponsor development of a custom feature for Mastodon if there are no volunteer takers.
I think the CC license makes the most sense. That was my first thought and others seem to agree.
Thanks all for weighing on this thread. I'd suggest the following two steps. If that sounds reasonable, perhaps we can turn it into an up/down vote?
Update the social.coop landing page to include a bullet point in the list "What makes social.coop different from other Mastodon instances?": "A default content license that encourages free sharing". We can update/remove this if/when Mastodon as a whole changes its policy.
Update the bylaws page with the following section:
Licensing
By default, you agree to license anything you post that is your own work under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. This is the license used by Wikipedia and many other community projects; it allows anyone to re-use the information if and only if they give you full credit and distribute modified versions under the same terms.
You may sometimes want to post content without licensing it freely; in those cases, please attach language that makes sense to you to the relevant toot (e.g., "(C) All rights reserved", or reference to a different license). Replying to yourself to attach non-free licensing is perfectly fine, but please do so shortly after the original post in order to avoid confusion and frustration.
If you share content you've not created yourself, our default assumption is that you are making it available under the "fair use" exemption granted in United States copyright law. If a third party makes a copyright claim about it, we will evaluate that claim on its merits.
Updated September 14: Spelled out that replies are a reasonable way to attach a non-free license, to mitigate against possible "Aahh I forgot a license now it's free forever" concern. ;-)
This makes a lot of sense to me and I believe will also shield social.coop from potential problems should things go south (unlikely as it is, it's still a possible scenario). I am ok with putting this to the vote.
Part of the reason I'm excited about social.coop is its strong explicit connections to and support of the free/open source software and free culture movements. I think it's important for us to embrace a licensing strategy that is in-line with the standards for licensing used by the free software, open source, and free culture movements. As @ErikMoeller5 shows above, leading organizations in all three movements have published definitions. The standards used by these movements are (with a few corner cases) compatible.
Since what's publishing here seems more like culture than software, the most reasonable way to do that is adopt a default license that conforms to the Definition of Free Cultural Works which is what Wikimedia uses and which is the most common definition (with full disclosure, both @erikmoeller5 and I had a hand in drafting it). There are many free licenses that conform the definition.
I'd suggest CC BY-SA because it is the most widely used and licensing compatibility is important for copyleft license. CC-0 (i.e., public domain) or CC BY would be close to equally acceptable to me.
Anything with an NC clause (including the PPL) would be far too restrictive IMHO and would considered non-free by our allies and peers in the free culture and free software movement.
I strongly support both of the suggestions that @erikmoeller5 makes here.
I am enjoying this refreshing dip into the effervescent waters of open licensing! The -NC aspect of CC has implications I did not realize before (and still don't fully grok).
My take here is:
a) We do need some sort of agreed written license because, as Erik first pointed out, the absence of a license is no license at all which makes us all potentially liable for copyright infringement.
b) Any such license needs to be agreed and consented to by the current members of social.coop through our voting process because you cannot impose contractual obligations without consent of the parties to the contract. (A license is a contract. We have a previously agreed contractual method of modifying our mutual contract, through our bylaws.)
In light of the above discussion, I tend to favor CC-SA as a form of license. I am open to looking closer at other license forms if they are strongly advocated.
Okay, I think we're almost ready to pull the trigger on this. I put together a more formal proposal draft here:
https://pad.riseup.net/p/socialcoop-license/timeslider#905
Feel free to edit directly:
https://pad.riseup.net/p/socialcoop-license
By the weekend I'll put something up for vote. Thanks for any further input!
I would like to mention that I would much rather have the PPL ( https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Peer_Production_License ) as a default license like platform.coop and ioo.coop
Also, I don't think the license part is radical enough to grant a place on the landing page?
I hear you, @fabianhjr . I'm personally opposed to this type of license proliferation -- it creates new barriers between projects that pursue similar objectives. For example, most of the open source / free culture community would reject such a license as non-free. That means content under this license would not be remixable and re-usable within the context of those communities. Is creating a walled off cooperative content ecosystem really a desirable goal?
Regardless of this argument and my personal longstanding opposition to NC licensing, a yes/no decision may not be the best way to account for legitimate differences of opinion. A dot vote with 3-4 options may be best:
- no change from current state -- all rights reserved by contributors
- switch to CC-BY-SA default as per original proposal
- switch to CC-BY-NC-SA (non-commercial but widely used)
- switch to Peer Production License (non-commercial/largely specific to parts of coop movement)
To allow for a robust decision, I'd want to make sure that we summarize arguments for/against each choice in a way that seems fair to everyone, and ask people to familiarize themselves with these arguments before the vote.
Sorry if this seems overly complicated but since this is a decision that will be difficult to reverse and that may have ramifications for years to come, it seems appropriate to get it right. Thoughts? If this seems like a reasonable process I'll put some more work into summarizing the arguments over the weekend.
A dot vote with 3-4 options may be best
Not really, it is neither clone safe nor favourite safe. (Might I suggest approval-voting?)
To allow for a robust decision, I'd want to make sure that we summarize arguments for/against each choice in a way that seems fair to everyone, and ask people to familiarize themselves with these arguments before the vote.
I would like to say that without a mechanism for people to choose their own licensing in a reasonable/non-repetitive-manual-way, it would be a bit abrupt to set a license default and you will find heated animosity between CC-0 (Public Domain), CC-BY (Permissive), CC-BY-SA(Copyleft), and PPL (Copyfair). (Which, due to social.coop context I was hoping for a Copyfair inclination)
You may sometimes want to post content without licensing it freely; in those cases, please attach a "(C)" followed by the license terms (e.g., "(C) All rights reserved", or reference to a different license). Replying to yourself to attach non-free licensing is perfectly fine, but please do so shortly after the original post in order to avoid confusion and frustration.
This doesn't solve opt-out/choice in a reasonable/easy way.
I'm personally opposed to this type of license proliferation -- it creates new barriers between projects that pursue similar objectives. For example, most of the open source / free culture community would reject such a license as non-free. That means content under this license would not be remixable and re-usable within the context of those communities.
While it would be non-free for for-profit corporations it doesn't mean it would be non-free for individuals, nonprofits, and coops. Rejection or not of those licenses would be purely ideological and not because of legal or copyright restrictions.
Either way, each person holds copyright under their creations and each person can license it in whichever way they deem appropriate. However, if the way of choosing a copyright scheme other than the default was reasonable/easy then compromising on the default license, from any side, would be easier. (Ie, I don't want to append "(C) PPL" to every toot manually and I was going to be an hypocrite and not mention the choice issue if there was consensus for PPL)
Sorry if this seems overly complicated but since this is a decision that will be difficult to reverse and that may have ramifications for years to come, it seems appropriate to get it right. Thoughts? If this seems like a reasonable process I'll put some more work into summarizing the arguments over the weekend.
No need to apologize, intellectual property law, copyright, and licensing are complex issues, it is good that you are having a go at it especially because it is not easy to address.
Sorry to be "that guy", but could you please summarise what's the current situation around this in a very simple way? I believe it will help us all better understand where we're standing with this.
Thank you in advance!
How does the license choice affect interoperability with other Mastodon etc instances? What does it mean to boost a toot? or to reply to one? or quote one?
Hello everyone!
this post will be slightly OT, but we need your help to understand what would be the best licence choice for our logo. We already settled the matter for the font we chose (which is released under a LIS open font licence 1.1), but we lack the necessary legal knowledge and expertise to do the same for the logo. If any of you is willing to help us, please comment in this thread: https://www.loomio.org/d/PGQHINcp/let-s-pick-a-new-logo-
Thank you all!
(1) This seems to have never gone up for a vote and seems to have just stalled out. (2) There are a couple questions here that Erik or others should probably reply to. (3) The proposal text itself was on a pad that seems to have been garbage collected by Riseup.
@alanz, setting the default license should really only help with boosting and such since we would explicitly be giving permission to do so under terms that would be easy to follow. The current situation (all rights reserved) means people do so at their own risk although there's a strong argument that anybody tooting is giving implicit permission to do so.
In any case, I would love to see us move to a default license that allows my toots to be free cultural works.
I'd would be interesting in engaging this discussion more but looking around can't find exactly what platforms ultimate goal is and how it plans to provide value for its members. Both of which would weigh heavily into a default license. Might be helpful to revisit this after that conversation.
@benjaminmakohill Thanks for pushing on this, and I'm sorry for not moving it forward.
Since it became clear that there's no obvious consensus answer to my original question, I feel I'm not in a good position to be a reasonably neutral facilitator of a decision-making process. I'm very strongly biased against certain possible outcomes (I believe licenses with NC provision and new efforts like the Peer Production License are actively harming the cause of free culture in many contexts in which they are employed). I would like to be in a good position to reason about this, and I don't think I can do that while also neutrally facilitating the discussion.
So I would appreciate it if someone else who is not strongly predisposed towards a specific outcome would step up as facilitator for this discussion and decision-making process. Any takers?
Interesting. Got a link to any background on why a PPL/NCP might be harmful?
I love the idea of the PPL but it'll make it too incompatible with other services
I kind of like the PPL intent but question the way it was applied.
"4.c - You may exercise the rights granted in Section 3 for commercial purposes only if:
i. You are a worker-owned business or worker-owned collective; and
ii. all financial gain, surplus, profits and benefits produced by the business or collective are distributed among the worker-owners"
So what if it was a user owned entity not a worker owned. And what if the majority of gain/surplus was distributed among the "worker-owners" but not all as it would stifle any chance for capital investment.
yeah, "all" is bad wording. obviously they would need funds for investment and emergencies and such
The best way to go is to give the poster options -- maybe in their profile settings? I like what Mayel mocked-up https://www.loomio.org/d/A4FvdL7l/default-license-for-toots-/13
I've seen an update implementing some kind of customisable metadata table to go along with the bio, where a user could list their website, pronouns, pets, &c. (https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/pull/6645), with this it would be pretty simple to add a default license key and set it how you want.
Hi all,
I may have missed something: do toots have a content license like Creative Commons Attribution attached to them? If not, should we set a default for the social.coop instance? Licensing toots freely by default (with the exception of fair use content) would make social.coop a "free culture" project like Wikipedia. It would be an additional safety net allowing anyone to create backups/mirrors beyond the implicit permission for federation to other instances. Thoughts?