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My works, non-copylefted
#&summary Why I don't use copyleft for my own works. #&
#&+classes=warning This old opinion is somewhat verbose and, well, old. See <@eval macros.titlelink('/writings/licensing')@> for my current opinion. Why do I keep changing opinions? Ugh… #&
My works, non-copylefted
A few months ago, I went from using the GPL for most of my software to BSD3; read about it here. I chose to continue to use Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike for most of my non-software works.
Now, I have chosen to stop copylefting my original works entirely.
I do this not because of a change in my general view of copyleft, but because I don't see myself ever using the legal benefits of copyleft; I can still understand why someone would choose to use copyleft to challenge copyright, fighting fire with fire, but it's just not something I would do.
The power of copyright lies in whether people accept the terms that an author puts forth, and that, if the copyright is abused, the author uses the law to punish the abusers. The same is essentially true for copyleft. So, if I release a work under e.g. Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike, and someone derives a new work from that and does not copyleft that, I have the power to make them change that decision; I could contact them and try to convince them to be nice and free their work; I could contact them and say they must free the work because of the law; and I could even sue them for not freeing their work!
Until now I have, without really realizing it, used copyleft licenses only for the signal they send: If you create something new from something I have made free, please make your work free as well. I never thought about what would happen and what I would do if someone broke the law and didn't follow my copyleft. I probably should have thought about that at the beginning, but hey, I just wanted to make my works freely available and modifiable and hope that others would do the same!
While I don't think it is wrong to use even lawsuits for upholding copyleft, it's not something I would ever do. If someone takes a copylefted work and abuses it, the community does not lose works; it simply does not gain them. Arguing against this argument would be the same as asserting that Hollywood loses money when people do not pay for digital, made-at-no-cost copies of their films – a view I certainly don't agree with.
Of course, I might never have to enter a lawsuit to uphold copyleft. Maybe just asking the abuser would be enough in all cases. But since this very page is public, the abuser would realize that I don't intend to sue in any case, so they might just ignore my request. And I don't intend to manipulate people into making them think I would sue them.
It's not my impression that there has been a lot of court cases involving copyleft; most of the license violations seem to be handled without the need for lawsuits, though I guess both lawyers and the threat of lawsuits are still quite used. The FSF's Compliance Lab gives a good impression of the potential difficulty of fixing license violations. I don't mind this compliance fixing, but in principle I am a bit against spending time making evil people relicense works when time could be spent making good people create new, free works. In the long run, this will surely result in more good, free works, though forcing someone evil to relicence might be practical in the short run.
In essence: Copyright is so hopelessly broken, and personally I'm not going to fight copyright with itself. This is because I'm not going to depend its and copyleft's legal benefits, and that is because I would only depend on something broken if I found it very necessary and not just useful in the short run. I just want to share my works freely, and if someone who uses my works don't want to do that, I'll simply ignore them. My walking away from copyleft makes my works usable by more people.
#&img;url=/img/licenses/wtfpl.png,float=right
So, from now on I'll use the Do What The Fuck You Want To Public License (WTFPL) for all my original works, software and culture alike. I don't think that the "fuck" in the license is a problem. I also thought about using Creative Commons Zero, but even though it can be used for software, OSI has not approved it because of a patent clause (FSF has approved it, and it's also DFSG-free), so it might be unpractical. WTFPL has been approved by the FSF. OSI rejected it, but that's because they didn't consider it a license and not because they disagreed with any of the (1) clauses in the WTFPL, so I don't think using the WTFPL will pose any practical problems. I'll still contribute to copyleft works, though I might mention this URL.
I was a bit inspired by Nina Paley's change to CC 0 from CC BY-SA. I think her story is scary.
My first copylefted program to be un-copylefted is the generator for this website which used to be under the AGPL. I'll relicense the rest of my works on a need-to-basis (there are so many, and I have other stuff to do).