We’ve been thinking and talking a lot about rights, IP, sharing, collaboration and innovation at YouMagine. We want to create a good license for 3D printed things and ToS that we can share with the community. And in order to do that we have to take into account many different angles, people and scenarios. At YouMagine we want to encourage sharing, collaboration and innovation. We’ve been thinking of new ways on how to do that. And we think we’ve come up with a new idea that may help this.
If a designer of a thing attaches a particular license to a thing this license permanently locks these rights away in a certain way. So a file may not be used for commercial purposes for example. Many people share and forget leaving a snipped of code of a photo behind somewhere under a certain license where it will stay for years. There are millions of lines of code locked behind licenses that could be shared more freely. Maybe if the designer looked at the file now she wouldn’t mind if the file was used commercially or shared without restrictions? What if to encourage more information sharing we made the licenses more dynamic? A person could always be asked to revisit a file or could unpublish and republish a thing under a freer license. But, speaking from experience we all know that this is not going to happen in a structural way. We’re all lazy creatures and have lots to do.
Rights melting like Ice cream. Creative Commons Attribution No Derivates. Dr. Wendy Longo.
What if we build this into the license? What if we gave people the option of saying I will share this under a Share Alike, Noncommercial license and after 12 months it becomes an Attribution license? As time goes on the file is worth less commercially anyway as people make similar things and technology progresses. The person could then monetize the file for the first year and then after it would be freer to share. This would let people build the wonderful heap of open source code that is the sharing world while still letting them profit from their creations. Also long forgotten snippets and photos would released automatically without people having to do anything with them. We like this as an idea and I mentioned it to Michael Weinberg of Public Knowledge during our ToS call and he came up with a name for it: Rights Decay. What do you think?
The concept is great and I can certainly see the need for such a thing. A few comments:
1: The word “decay” needs some work. It is very clear, but that word tends to have a negative connotation, as it is attributed to something that slowly loses all value. I think instead it should be named more from the public point of view in that it is something that used to be valuable to a single person but it is now of great value to everyone. Quickly tried to come up with some other potential names: “Eventually Open”, “Gradually Public”, “Lazy Libre”, “Caveat Libertor”, etc.
2: Could there be a way for the original rights owner to ‘renew’ the original license? If someone posts a design that is truly amazing and they know they will only have 12 months to realize any potential for the work, I think the will opt for the traditional licenses rather than putting themselves under an arbitrary deadline. The availability of renewal will convince more people to use this license at this start without feeling undue time pressure. If they suddenly see tons of clones appearing 11months in, they can renew it a bit more and try to capitalize on the market, but in most cases the 12 months will lapse and the public will get it. I would imagine it as more of a psychological “safety net” aiding in adoption rather than a widely used feature.
Chris,
Thanks for taking the time to reply.
1. Yeah the decay is negative would agree! Free Later? Share later? There are a lot of options here.
2. The renew thing is an option. But then again you can always do that. Take something offline and then republish under a new license. We’ve spoken about exactly the case you thought of. We’re not sure to be honest?