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what would the world look like if, instead of copyright, sales of creative works included a statement of how much the creators were paid out of this sale?
this thought has inspired me to think about copyright licenses again. i have been sketching out the desirable properties of a family of profit-sharing copyright licenses. they would allow non-commercial activities to proceed unimpeded, but make some additional requirements of commercial users.
in the context of software (though i think this could analogously apply to other creative works), whenever the software is:
- distributed to the customer
- hosted by the seller for the customer’s use
such that the seller realizes financial benefit, whether directly by the customer paying seller for the software or service or indirectly by advertisement revenue, grants, higher valuations, etc. the seller must inform the customer how much goes to support the authors of the software.
i imagine a copyleft/share-alike version and a plain non-copyleft version. both versions should have patent grants, warranty disclaimers, following the most robust of free software and open source licenses. as far as i can tell, such licenses would comply with the free software definition, the open source definition, and the debian free software guidelines.
i can also imagine versions with further restrictions, which would certainly not comply with those definitions. requiring profit sharing violates the open source definition and debian free software guidelines. restricting the uses the software may be put toward violates all three.
then i imagine versions with a focus more along the lines of the creative commons licenses, sitting between CC BY(-SA) and CC BY-NC(-SA). perhaps something like CC BY-PS(-SA)?
now, voluntary (or even manditory) profit sharing licenses won’t actually do anything without the infrastructure to pay the creators. there are numerous difficulties there - we live and create in an international context but making payments internationally is still difficult. then software projects often have dozens (and sometimes hundreds) of contributers.
liberapay is moderatly set up for this. i would like to see better consensus mechanisms for teams, and not just relying on the commercial payment processors, but, well, so it goes.