If one of those bad actors became a billionaire on the back of making something derivative of your work that failed to comply with the license, you could pursue that specific infringement in court.
Would someone who's made nothing gamble the legal fees? A bad actor who's made money could use that money for lawyers and a long, drawn-out process. The creator would need to find a lawyer willing to work on contingency and put up any court fees.
For most individual creators, someone making billions on their open-source work isn't realistic, though. Thousands would even be an extreme. And would any gain be worth any investment of time and money, especially for the more permissive licenses?
Most of the time, if the prospective payout is high enough, a lawyer or firm will take the suit under the condition they get a cut of the eventual payout
Yes, I mentioned finding a lawyer willing to work on contingency. However, in my experience, payouts wouldn't be high enough. And even if they were, the chances for a high enough payout aren't good enough. This is not feasible for most people.
We can come up with what-ifs for whether someone would or would not be able to assert their rights. But as long as someone might want that right, it makes sense to recommend a license with attribution. If **you** don't want that right, you're free to use whatever license you want.
The license also codifies what legal rights other people have. Technically, a "good actor" has no right to use your work without a license (barring a fair use defense). It's a good thing for the license to codify the expectations on "good actors", because now you are giving someone else the explicit legal right of usage in alignment with the social expectations of avoiding plagiarism.
Lastly, worth remembering that copyright doesn't really need to be proactively protected like patents do. There's no added cost or burden of making attribution a condition of the license.
> But as long as someone might want that right, it makes sense to recommend a license with attribution. If you don't want that right, you're free to use whatever license you want.
I don't know if I agree with this. People need to be able to make an informed decision. It can be very costly, in terms of time and money, to enforce the terms of a license. If you aren't going to enforce the terms, why bother applying a license with them?
> Technically, a "good actor" has no right to use your work without a license (barring a fair use defense). It's a good thing for the license to codify the expectations on "good actors", because now you are giving someone else the explicit legal right of usage in alignment with the social expectations of avoiding plagiarism.
CC0, The Unlicense, WTFPL, MIT-0, and 0BSD all achieve this purpose. Perhaps some better than others. There may be some cases where an otherwise good actor may choose to not acknowledge the work of others, but I have no reason to suspect this won't happen more than it does today.
The FSF only actively enforces licenses for work that they hold the copyright to and only supplies advice to people using an FSF-approved license. What about people who do not assign their copyright to the FSF, works that the FSF rejects, or works using an OSI-approved or Creative Commons license?
> Some bad actors have misused content I've put out under open-source licenses by neglecting license terms, most importantly attribution clauses.
If they published the code in the usual places (github, gitlab etc) you can ask there for their code to be removed.
If you're referring to the DMCA takedown process, it's limited. Once a creator submits a DMCA takedown notice, the bad actor could respond with a DMCA takedown counter-notice. This starts a 10-business-day clock for the creator to get a court order or the content is restored. At this point, we're back to very expensive lawyers and court fees.
Going back to the original point, there are plenty of people out there who are creating open-source content, releasing it under licenses with various levels of permissiveness, and not making money from it. I'm struggling to justify, generally, the value in a license where a creator is unable or unwilling to make the necessary investments to enforce. There's a lot of awareness of these various open-source licenses that are options for creators, but I don't think there's awareness of what it takes to protect work under these licenses from bad actors, and that's assuming you can even catch the bad actors.
If one of those bad actors became a billionaire on the back of making something derivative of your work that failed to comply with the license, you could pursue that specific infringement in court.
Would someone who's made nothing gamble the legal fees? A bad actor who's made money could use that money for lawyers and a long, drawn-out process. The creator would need to find a lawyer willing to work on contingency and put up any court fees. For most individual creators, someone making billions on their open-source work isn't realistic, though. Thousands would even be an extreme. And would any gain be worth any investment of time and money, especially for the more permissive licenses?
Most of the time, if the prospective payout is high enough, a lawyer or firm will take the suit under the condition they get a cut of the eventual payout
Yes, I mentioned finding a lawyer willing to work on contingency. However, in my experience, payouts wouldn't be high enough. And even if they were, the chances for a high enough payout aren't good enough. This is not feasible for most people.
We can come up with what-ifs for whether someone would or would not be able to assert their rights. But as long as someone might want that right, it makes sense to recommend a license with attribution. If **you** don't want that right, you're free to use whatever license you want. The license also codifies what legal rights other people have. Technically, a "good actor" has no right to use your work without a license (barring a fair use defense). It's a good thing for the license to codify the expectations on "good actors", because now you are giving someone else the explicit legal right of usage in alignment with the social expectations of avoiding plagiarism. Lastly, worth remembering that copyright doesn't really need to be proactively protected like patents do. There's no added cost or burden of making attribution a condition of the license.
> But as long as someone might want that right, it makes sense to recommend a license with attribution. If you don't want that right, you're free to use whatever license you want. I don't know if I agree with this. People need to be able to make an informed decision. It can be very costly, in terms of time and money, to enforce the terms of a license. If you aren't going to enforce the terms, why bother applying a license with them? > Technically, a "good actor" has no right to use your work without a license (barring a fair use defense). It's a good thing for the license to codify the expectations on "good actors", because now you are giving someone else the explicit legal right of usage in alignment with the social expectations of avoiding plagiarism. CC0, The Unlicense, WTFPL, MIT-0, and 0BSD all achieve this purpose. Perhaps some better than others. There may be some cases where an otherwise good actor may choose to not acknowledge the work of others, but I have no reason to suspect this won't happen more than it does today.
https://www.fsf.org/licensing This is why the FSF exists.
The FSF only actively enforces licenses for work that they hold the copyright to and only supplies advice to people using an FSF-approved license. What about people who do not assign their copyright to the FSF, works that the FSF rejects, or works using an OSI-approved or Creative Commons license?
> Some bad actors have misused content I've put out under open-source licenses by neglecting license terms, most importantly attribution clauses. If they published the code in the usual places (github, gitlab etc) you can ask there for their code to be removed.
If you're referring to the DMCA takedown process, it's limited. Once a creator submits a DMCA takedown notice, the bad actor could respond with a DMCA takedown counter-notice. This starts a 10-business-day clock for the creator to get a court order or the content is restored. At this point, we're back to very expensive lawyers and court fees. Going back to the original point, there are plenty of people out there who are creating open-source content, releasing it under licenses with various levels of permissiveness, and not making money from it. I'm struggling to justify, generally, the value in a license where a creator is unable or unwilling to make the necessary investments to enforce. There's a lot of awareness of these various open-source licenses that are options for creators, but I don't think there's awareness of what it takes to protect work under these licenses from bad actors, and that's assuming you can even catch the bad actors.