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:
Why?
Observations to consider, and factors to balance:
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. 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.
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.
How wide?
A Public Domain Dedication-wide. My explanation of how I believe this will best advance your cause, will segue from the following philosophical tract which I beg you to indulge.
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.
http://www.earthbound.io/legal/absa-freaking-lutely-anything-license1.0.txtIt 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. (Or, if it isn't necessarily brilliant, the fact that they got so many people to use it
despite the fact is brilliant . . . if perhaps sickening . . .)
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. 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. (Actually, that is an arguable case for current copyright/trademark/patent laws. Possibly with the exception of software patents, and some copyright whores of corporations (I really can't use any other word there.)
Probably the only exception I would make is that I would absolutely want to forestall intellectual property/copyright etc. trolls from abusing the public with claims that my work violates
their intellectual rights/copyrights, so that under the duress and intimidation ("chilling effect") of such claims, those whom they oppose are squelched out of existence. An example of this horror is in software patents surrounding video codecs. The minefield of video codec intellectual property laws and litigations is in my opinion a despicable pandora (yes--let's mix these metaphors--a pandora of minefields), which has inhibited so much innovation and, ultimately I would argue, has also undermined the whole market and area of video codecs, and associated video copying/distribution means, etc. The last I researched it, intellectual property questions about video codecs place a stranglehold on those who wish to simply create absolutely Public Domain/royalty/intellectual-property-entanglement-free video codecs. Troll after troll lays in wait to pounce on any new video codec which they claim abuses their rights in some algorithm or idea.
A Public Domain Dedication could prevent that by making (for example) the following clear: 1) what exactly you've contributed that is original and marketable--arguably even disruptive-- 2) that you irrevocably decree that anyone can exploit those ideas without any limitation and for any purpose whatever.
This naturally and inherently squelches all questions of copyright trolling, because it makes it clear that you did this first, and you also said that anybody else can do this without limitation, so that anyone who comes along and claims otherwise (in other words, any troll X who claims others can't use the ideas for profit, because troll X supposedly has sole rights to those ideas) -- anyone who claims otherwise is dismissed with prejudice, owing to the very public, well-known origin of those actual rights, and that moreover, those rights were and are irrevocably dedicated to everyone.
Yes indeed, those irrevocably dedicated rights
include the right to go all, uh, closed-source on the public, if anyone wishes to. So, no, this would not prevent others from e.g. creating closed-source or otherwise proprietary clones of your ideas. But for the reasons I gave after I linked to my text, it is my strong preference to risk that.
Consider what is even now unfolding in these forums, surrounding GPU proof-of-work momentum (PTS/MMC or whatever else) miners. What model are so many choosing (or at least initially they have), right here in an arena where you would
think there is hearty support of an open-source model? They're all trying to bait people into mining with miners which they (pointedly!) refuse to open-source, possibly owing to the (ridiculous!) fear that if they did so, some portion of a supposedly finite pie would become lost to them.
You paid dga a very nice ProtoShares bounty to open-source his GPU miner code, and then a few ran off with the code, modified it to run on Windows, compiled it, did
not (so far as I'm aware) publicly post their modifications of the source, but did release binaries . . . which mine a percent of the time to their own address. Meanwhile, I for example want access to the source so that I can e.g. modify it to recognize more than one graphics card--I might hastily pull the source, code my proposed changes, and push it back up
if the source was there -- but I can't: yes, a lot of miners are making ~10x the profits they previously did . . . while innovation is stifled for the gambit.
(By the way, EDIT: I keep waffling about whether I support completely open-source code for miners or closed-source where I donate a percent of mining to the coder. I think I'd like both together best.)
Your development philosophy/social contract etc. may have difficulty gaining full traction among the very folks who are most enthusiastic about the potential outcomes of your work!
What kind of traction do you expect your model will find among, say the Really Big Boys?
It's simply fundamentally incompatible with the mechanisms they've exploited to make their untold fortunes. That is a
hard, hard sell. (Apparently, even among many of your peers who highly esteem you.)
If Invictus Innovations wishes to be part of a truly global and truly transformative/distruptive movement, the fact of the matter is that you've got to be able to let folks who prefer a different playbook to operate from that playbook. And last I heard, the proprietary/closed/secretive playbook was still very much the playbook of, uh, the world's largest and most powerful corporations. (And many people who frequent this forum.)
The risk is that your work will probably be abused by so many silly fools. The benefit, however, is that in enabling (as you may suppose) people to do whatever they will, those who would abuse your work and yet who also wield enormous power--these will expose your ideas to the wider world. And you know what? The wider world will become curious, get educated about what's going on, and see that there's a better way to do it . . .
and then they might be motivated to start up their own enterprises in a globally frictionless market, and wipe the Really Big Boys' arses with their better approaches and ideas.
And what of the folks who agree with your philosophy/approach? Well, whatever way you go with this philosophically, the folks who like your approach will follow it.
However, if the Really Big Boys are warded off by fear of breaking your model/social/intellectual property/whatever contract, the masses whom they could potentially expose the ideas to may therefore not be so exposed to such ideas (and their origins). But if the Really Big Boys are made very welcome to try whatever the heck they think is a good idea, they might give it a shot. Yeah they may be liable to not quite "get it," and make mistakes in what they try--there are hundreds of very ridiculous patent applications out there which for all the world describe only a shadow of Bitcoin, because the folks who file them simply do not yet fully grasp the technology, and the nature of this Blockchain Revolution, shall we call it.
And while the Really Big Boys are giving it a shot ... the stakes will be made higher for those who would play in the field even against the Very Big Boys . . . and the potential payoffs will therefore also be higher.
All that said, I would not wish to relinquish moral rights in my work (and I understand that a Public Domain Dedication cannot relinquish those rights, and that no license can). This includes the moral right to publicly object to any abuses of my work, knowing full well that my only accomplishment in such objections may be merely expressing my view. Which views may or may not be of worth to others. Which views may or may not liberally heap shame on others who flagrantly abuse my work.
To that end, you are entirely free to adapt that very text I cite above. Perhaps in the section:
==THIS WOULD BE A PREAMBLE IF IT ADDED ANYTHING OF WORTH TO THE PRECEDING AND IF IT CAME BEFORE IT==-- perhaps in that section, you could express your
wishes as to how people use your model/code/software/process etc., and opinion that all intellectually property is, well, malarkey. You could, moreover, describe the general organizational/process/logical/ideological/systems organization of e.g. Keyhotee/Bitshares/Distributed Autonomous Corporations/Blockchain-based contracts/Digital Assets, and assert e.g. your organizations' contributions of original expressions and ideas in software/social engineering etc. -- in other words, you could express and lay claim to intellectual property rights to everything original Invictus has created, and at the same time permanently and irrevocably deed all such rights to the Public Domain. It would meanwhile preserve your moral rights (more about that in a bit), which are in any case irrevocable, and moreover they are also the better power and influence in this enterprise (more about that in a bit).
As described, this would first dismiss the dangers of intellectual property trolls by making it prominently clear that no, these ideas were your ideas, and you dedicated as many of the rights in them to the Public Domain, so that everyone has the right to do whatever they want with these ideas--including using the ideas in ways that anyone would pretend to have sole rights to--while clearly, they don't actually have those rights--because everyone has those rights, and they are simply trolls.
A Public Domain Dedication would, I think, best open up the whole world of possibility to, well, the whole world. It would open up all the possible global risk/reward ratios that who-knows-what-people out there will discover and invent. Let silly bandits and nincompoops be silly bandits and nincompoops. But please make it as easy as possible to play with your ideas and code, because the people whom you hope will see through the bandits/nincompoops probably will, and as I've described, they'll probably be the ones to show up and show how it should really be done.
Also, if you express your ideology/social contract clearly in the section (of my above linked dedication) which I invite you to, and couple this with an expressed wish that everyone will follow that guideline, I think that might best vouchsafe your moral rights. This is because your expressed wishes will be coupled with the full risk of your gamble that people might abuse their rights and go against your wishes--and when they do, and when they topple as a consequence, so much better the lesson of experience both for them and for bystanders.
(And so much the better your right to get up and say "I told you so!--" although I hope you would let bitter experience punish people enough, without adding ridicule to defeat.)
Seriously,
please freely adapt the Public Domain Dedication which I have written and linked above--who would not want to read something that so joyfully thumbs its nose at so many restrictions, if I may say so? Yeah, maybe some would write it off as simply loony. But folks who are inclined to write you off are going to do that anyway, whatever you do.
All of the above is why I think a Public Domain dedication is the best option. It would necessarily have to exclude everything you've made use of which is e.g. under copyleft/copyright models: I would just put all of
your work in the Public Domain.
I have urgent legal advice for Invictus, which I will email or message to you privately.
[Asides: I'm inclined to agree with you that so many ideas around intellectual copyright are silly, btw, and this stunner of an article was among such things as began to persuade me thus:
http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20111005102810176I might make exceptions for the idea of copyright of general creative, non-mathematical works,
but, for anything mathematical (which is
all software), I'm inclined to think because strictly and literally, all software is zeros and ones (or in the case of qubits, possibly any other number base system), it cannot and should not be copywriteable. Intel was laughed at for attempting to copyright the number 8086, but at the logical, literal, final express form of software, too many people copyright large numbers.]
Show Posts
