Okay! Lookie here! I penned an epic!
These are my thoughts regarding item 3) Preventing businesses that believe in intellectual property from using any DAC that doesn't honor the SCSL:
My opinion is that every entity which seeks to become part of something has an obligation and responsibility to be a good citizen of whatever they are becoming part of. The rules have already been agreed upon and established. Latecomers should abide by the rules set forth before they arrived and the social consensus / contract represents what the community believes to be the minimum level of fairness. The social consensus license gives the social contract some teeth so that the will of the community must be respected by entities coming from other communities.
Just as we are expected to follow whatever money transmitter laws and other rules they put up to protect their community they should be expected to follow the rules we set up to protect our community. I don't see why we should give them a pass when we don't get a pass when we try to open a bank account or set up a business to turn fiat into Bitshares.
At some point--possibly sooner than you think, if it is not so already--the Really Big Boys will not only want a piece of the "pie," they will catch on to the fact they too can create incredibly good pies (as it were) out of thin air.
Bitshares, Protoshares, Bitcoin, none of this was created out of thin air. You think the code wrote itself? You think all the philosophy behind it came out of thin air? The psychological insights? The marketing? What about the people willing to take risks, uncertain as to whether or not they'll end up in jail over it?
It did not come out of thin air. Value never comes out of thin air. If people did not have faith in the Bitcoin protocol and if people did not believe in the code then it would have no value and the Big Boys wouldn't have picked up on it.
What you can probably count on, however, is that they will fail to appreciate how exactly your social contract and model empowers your, uh, pies. They will therefore expend great efforts in forming what you might only regard as half-baked pies; and worse, if you adopt a model which is at odds with their silly proprietary crutches, they might either be too frightened to proceed more aggressively with their ideas--as the market hopes they will--let's bring everything out at full speed and see what survives and what doesn't!--or they might fumble with the difficulties and inevitable misunderstandings and/or perceived vagaries of your model.
They might try to make a patented version of Bitcoin. Apple is already attempting something like that, as is JP Morgan, IBM and others. They have patents right now which seem to be for types of software which are a remarkably similar to Bitcoin.
What we don't want is for DACs to end up patented by some big company that had nothing to do with creating the first DAC. In fact if you go with copy left then it cannot be patented at all.
Whatever their possible weaknesses (and who knows but what they may be right with some of their silly ideas that you might regard as crutches), I propose that we absolutely want to welcome the Really Big Boys with arms as wide open as they can possibly stretch.
Why? Are the Big Boys welcoming these ideas with open arms? They aren't removing their regulations on crowd funding and their 1 million dollar limitation. The social consensus license is perhaps one of the best legal shields to protect the community if used appropriately. There is no reason that I can see why the social consensus license should be watered down or opened up to let the Big Banks in unless they are willing to play by the rules the community sets for them in advance. Just as the Big Boys are worried about money laundering, drugs, and they demand that we follow their rules to interact with the banking community I don't see why our community cannot have rules of its own which we demand they play by in order to use technology developed by our community using our decentralized processes.
If they want to benefit from decentralized technology they should promote decentralization. The social consensus license is just one possible license to promote decentralization.
I personally strongly dislike any license which places any constraints whatever on anyone. (That means both copyright and copyleft, and anything and everything so obligatory-copy-or-not-copy-whatever.) I mockingly penned a variant of the Public Domain Dedication in rebellion against such.
The purpose of a software license is to interface with the wider community which is built up on rules, laws, courts and so on. If you have no language to interact with their system then you'll be completely exploited by it. If your license is completely permissive and lets anyone do anything then you wont have a community for very long and it wont be very sustainable because there won't be any ability to set rules.
If you believe there should be no rules it does not change the fact that you cannot promote decentralization without rules. These rules could be like the axioms in the Bitshares white paper or in the form of a social consensus license but having it written down can show that you have a clear set of intentions.
It is my opinion that all (most?) copyright and license etc. organizational/rights models have produced various things of value. I can point to one brilliant piece of software and say: Open Source created that, and I can point to another brilliant piece of software and say: Proprietary technology/intellectual property/copyright methods made that.
This is a philosophical argument but I'll say that if you're trying to create decentralized, open, community owned software then software patents and copyright make it very hard to do that because it stifles innovation. Proprietary technology if it is closed source cannot be trusted.
I therefore personally would not wish to curtail any process of innovation which anyone chooses to undertake, nor the necessarily associated intellectual property ideologies (or lack thereof) from which they would pursue their undertaking.
I agree with this in theory. In practice it's just not possible to do it like that and protect yourself from predatory Big Boys who wont respect your community or any of it's principles. So how do you build a community without making the intentions known to everyone, whether they believe in the law or not? You can make it closed source but then you're breaking your own principle of being open, so the way to maintain the principle of being open while also making your intentions the law, requires that you create a software license where it is made clear. Since the community already agrees on the 10% going to Protoshares, the social consensus license would put that intention into a legally recognized document which the Big Boys would have to respect.
This includes knowingly and voluntarily risking that anyone could therefore undertake what I consider to be abuses of bodies of work which I have created, hoping that somewhere in the mix of those abuses there is also a mix of benefits to society.
Why rely on hope? This is a philosophical argument, but I see no reason why all aspects of free speech should not be used to promote the social contract/consensus. That means legal tools like the social consensus software license, that could mean legally forming your businesses in such a way that respect for the social consensus is baked in. Why even give them the option to violate the social consensus when you can use all your resources to make it where there is a strong deterrent against violating the social consensus?
You don't have to rely on hope. If someone violates the social consensus then they are violating the software license and for that reason no business will be able to violate it. Individuals might be able to violate it if they are willing to ignore the law, but businesses cannot.