What licensing applies to our work?

Boy, is it a relief to hear you say that! Phew!

I am not a Lawyer.

Options:

• Creative Commons. (I recommend.)
• Unlimited License / Public Domain. (I recommend.)
• Roll your own license. (Caution, but it can be useful.)
• Board control. (Caution, but it can be useful.)
• Traditional Copyright. (Don't do it! But it exists.)
• No copyright policy. (Very bad.)
• Lock down paranoia mode. (You do this, and I'm outta here.)

Basically, CC licenses are the easiest, most basic, friendly way to go. What you do, is you go to the Creative Commons website, click "Licence your work" (it's big, in the upper-right hand corner of the page,) and answer the questions.

It'll give you a legal license statement, to include in the text, and an easy-to-read "human friendly" license statement, that just spells it out in a paragraph or 2 of plain English.

They also have a "Public Domain / Unlimited License" license that you can apply. (Since it's legally iffy about if it's possible to even release something into the public domain. What they do as a workaround is just make a license granting unlimited use, with no warranty.)

You can roll your own license, but I advise against it-- there are smarter people than us, who have thought deeply about these things.

One thing that is somewhat dangerous, but that I cautiously recommend, is the creation of a trusted board, that owns the copyrights. "Trusted? By whom?" Trusted by your contributors. This is hard, though, because you have to spend time making up the rules of the board, and getting buy-in. But if you do it, what it means is that you can release the text under a *number* of licenses, even as new licensing situations come up. It's "long term agile," in that respect. You start with a CC license, but if they find some flaw 10 years down the road, you can relicense with full authority, under another license.

We probably should do **something like this** ANYWAYS. There should probably be something saying, "You agree that The Co-Intelligence Institute has unlimited rights to your work" (or whatever the legalese is,) so that decisions can be made, and licensing can be performed. I do believe that the CC pages can help us answer the question: "How do I collect contributions? How do I legally publish an Internet-based aggregate work assembled in good faith?"

You could just copyright the work, in the old traditional ways. Please don't, though. :)

The second to worst (maybe) thing that you can do, is not have ANY copyright policy. See MeatballWiki:CopyrightTrap, CommunityWiki:CopyrightTarPit. Technically legally speaking, I don't believe it's possible for us to somehow relinquish ownership. What we say is automatically copyrighted, as I understand. This is how all the licensing messes come about. Recall, though, that we are not lawyers.

The worst thing is copyright paranoia, and bizarre ideas about ownership of ideas. Scanning websites for anyone talking about using colors and their relationship with values, or organizational structures, and then threatening to sue them off the Internet. Fortunately, this is not the option we are taking.

The questions I immediately care about:

• Should we care? If anyone releases our content Creative Commons, will anyone object, or will we have any legal difficulties? (Many wiki have gone far, without caring, whether legal or not.)
• If we do care, what agreements will we hold about how output is published and licensed?
• What interactions should the CIC website have with contributors, to certify that they understand the agreement, and that they agree with it?

Off the top of my head, I personally feel, "Well, yes, maybe, I guess so," for the first, "dual-license: 1. Unlimited License to the Co-Intelligence Institute, 2. Creative Commons by Attribution, in both licenses, applying for all content, unless the text says otherwise," and for the third, I would think that a simple message next to the "Post comment" button would be sufficient, and / or a check box on the sign-up page.

I am not a Lawyer. My giving these thoughts does not establish an attorney-client relationship between us. These are just my thoughts, as an ordinary guy, who studies this a teeny tiny bit in free time, by necessity of working in Free Software.

For all the reasons Tom and Lion have outlined, I'd suggest we go with CC and we make that explicit up front with the open question around the book. I don't think of choosing CC as a default position but one that comes with it some profound implications that have at their heart a collective collaborative cooperation spirit. Open sourcing material we create to me is a value that has alot of power. I'd love to see those articulated somewhere, once we are clear about our choice.

This is also from an email I wrote 12/27 to the convenors:

this is an important thread and it might be very interesting to have it as one of the topics for consideration by everyone, even as we make clear the convenors' initial choice and
preference. there's a beauty in transparency, and a power, and it's also an indicator of CI in action.

licensing options

- for the potential book
- and for material collectively generated on the site
- as well as material shared on the site

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons_License

is a great resource as is the www.creativecommons.org site. one of the powerful points around copyleft is to free information for use by a larger community - a strong reaction against proprietary information. and given the deep thinking within the field of CI around information, knowledge,
cooperation, sharing, open source, it feels like a rich terrain for discussion. i'm sure we'll run into some diversity as well. all the juicier.

also there's another licensing project called FAM which is usually used for musicians, but it might be an interesting model to check into for those interested and perhaps the license would translate elegantly over to the CI field. it's another interesting option and some of the invitees may be interested in the difference between this licensing option and others from CC.

http://www.famlicense.org/
http://freethiscd.com/

i'm going to check in with derrick (one of the authors of the license) about how he sees this license
translating over into the work of writers/thinkers/scientists/researchers and their "intellectual property."

love
sheri