Hi all, in these two threads
* https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2023/02/msg00017.html * https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2023/02/msg00022.html we had the chance to confront each other about the emerging A.I. mass adoption and about which licensing model would be useful to adopt to protect the freedom of code, data, models, etc. One topic that seems to make people worry is the "fair use" which is a legal term but not really well defined - I would use the attribute "blurry" for it - and this could be a triky attribute to debate about in a trial. I wish to add my two cents about this topic and I will follow two main guidelines:1. historical evolution, 2. priority of legislative sources. First of all, we can start with a "for absurd" reasoning and because we do not have a clear legal definition of "fair use", then we consider the worst case which means "everything". Well, this is exactly the situation before the introduction of the copyright: everything was a fair use case. Then the copyright was introduced to grant to authors some kind of exclusive rights: moral and material rights, both. As you can imagine, without the moral rights there would be no material rights, indeed. However, this aspect is not relevant for our goal here but just to underline the priority. The copyright was introduced to move some profit from the editors to the authors who were starving. Thus, the material rights are about business, commercial and marketing. Obviously these three terms were not developed as we are used today but basically these three activities are clearly related to the value and thus they SHOULD be exclusive of the author for every copyrighted stuff that s/he created. Moreover, the copyright applies even if the author does not explicitly claim differently. Under this point of view, we still do not know what is "fair use" but for certain we know what is NOT included in "fair use" otherwise the copyright would fail in principle. Specularly, the copyleft as well. In fact, the copyright claims {business, commercial, marketing} are exclusive rights of the author (all rights reserved) implicitly considering that the author's intention is selling them otherwise no one could legally enjoy the author's work. Copyleft trades these rights for something else rather than money but freedom, something more valuable for some people. Thus, with copyleft if you like to enjoy the {business, commercial, marketing} rights of someone else's work, then you have to share back something about the original work. Thus this equation takes place: copyright : money ~alike~ copyleft : freedom My proposal to apply the GPLv3 or AGPLv3 - not directly to an object but - to a collection of objects using the database protection, automatically also solves the problem of a blurry "fair use" definition. However, to be more incisive about "fair use", it is better to declare explicitly what is not "fair use". Otherwise, we risk having to explain this in court. Like in this file header: https://github.com/robang74/isar/blob/evo2/meta/recipes-support/expand-on-first-boot/files/expand-last-partition.sh # (C) 2022, Roberto A. Foglietta <[email protected]> # SPDX-License-Identifier: all rights reserved, but fair use allowed # Fair use includes test, learning and marketing but not sales, redistribution # leasing, renting or every other commercial/business activities without the # consent of the author. Every company or individual allowed to use this # code behind these limitations will be listed here below, if any. In this specific case, I decided that marketing belongs to "fair use" because it lets my product be known. In case of A.I. it would not be fine because the A.I. could suggest directly or indirectly to drink a X-soft-drink and this is marketing, clearly. So, in conclusion "fair use" was the standard before the copyright introduction then "all rights are reserved" became the standard with the copyright introduction but this creates others problems because it was too restrictive so the "fair use" concept was introduced to relax the copyright but "fair use" was not well defined. It was not well defined because "{business, commercial, marketing} rights are reserved" is enough and moreover protecting these rights is the core reason of copyright law existence altogether. IMHO, the best we can do is to ask the Free Software Foundation to write two more licenses or updates A/GPLv3 in A/GPLv4 in which it wil clearly stated that the license applies to the composition and the {business, commercial, marketing} rights are reserved and exchanged for freedom. Then the license presents a "fair use" open definition in which some rights {testing, learning} are clearly included. Everything else should be brought back in these two categories. Finally, the license should state that every collection item that does not have its own specific copyright and license note/header, it is licensed under A/GPLv3. So, in the most simple case in which no any file report a specific copyright note/header but just the repository, then this happens: - git repository A is licensed with A/GPLv4 - the composition is under A/GPLv4 - every file is under A/GPLv3 Clearly, we can also have LGPLv4 as long as it makes sense every other license could be used to create a collection-oriented version of that license. Moreover, when an A.I.'s training engine hits a project repository protected by A/GPLv4 then all the inputs before and after that hit become part of the input collection which will be protected by A/GPLv4 and all the related consequences that I have just explained in others e-mail here. Everything IMHO and hoping that it helps, R-
