Support me this summer in the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop! This summer, I'm writing The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI, a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux that explains how to be an effective AI critic.
More than a quarter-century ago, a group of hackers decided that, as a label, "free software" was a liability, and they set out to replace it with a different label, "open source," on the basis that "open source" was easier to understand and using it instead of "free software" would speed up adoption.
They were right. The switch from calling it "free software" to calling it "open source" sparked a massive, unbroken wave of adoption, to the point where today it's hard to find anyone who will profess enmity for "open source," not even Microsoft (who once called it "a cancer").
Two motives animated "open source" partisans: first, they didn't like the ambiguity of "free software." Famously, Richard Stallman (who coined "free software") viewed this ambiguity as a feature, not a bug. He liked that "free" had a double meaning: "free as in speech" (an ethical proposition) and "free as in beer" (without cost). Stallman viewed the ambiguity of "free software" as a koan/conversation-starter: a normie, hearing "free software," would inquire as to whether this meant that the software couldn't be sold commercially, which was an opening for free software advocates to explain the moral philosophy of software freedom.
For "open source" partisans, this was a bug, not a feature. They wanted to enlist other hackers to develop freely licensed codes, and convince their bosses to adopt this code for internal and public-facing use. For the "open source" advocates, a term designed to confuse was a liability, a way to turn off potential collaborators ("if you're explaining, you're losing").
But the "open source" side wasn't solely motivated by a desire to simplify things by jettisoning the requirement to conscript curious bystanders into a philosophical colloquy. Many of them also disagreed with the philosophy of free software. They weren't excited about building a "commons" or in preventing rent extraction by monopolistic firms. Some of them quite liked the idea of someday extracting their own rents.
For these "open source" advocates, the advantage of free software methodologies – publishing code for peer review and third-party improvement – was purely instrumental: it produced better code. Publication, peer review, and unrestricted follow-on innovation are practices firmly rooted in the Enlightenment, and are the foundation of the scientific method. Allowing strangers to look at your code, critique it, and fix it is a form of epistemic humility, an admission that we are all forever at risk of fooling ourselves, and it's only through adversarial peer review that we can know whether we are right.
This is true! Publishing code makes it better, and prohibitions on code publication make code worse. That's the lesson of the ransomware epidemics of the past decade: these started with a series of leaks from the NSA and CIA. Both agencies have an official policy of researching widely used software in hopes of finding exploitable bugs and then keeping those bugs secret, so that they will be preserved in the wild and can be exploited when the agencies wish to attack their enemies.
The name for this practice is NOBUS, which stands for "No One But US": we alone are smart enough to find these bugs, so if we discover them and keep them secret, no one else will find them and use them to attack our own people. This is a provably false proposition, and a very dangerous one.
The Vault 7, Vault 8, and NSA cyberweapon leaks blew a hole in NOBUS. Failures in the agencies' own security protocols resulted in the release of a long list of defects (mostly in versions of Windows, but other OSes and programs were affected). Malicious software authors used these as can openers to pry open millions of computers, enlisting them into botnets and/or shutting them down with ransomware.
These leaks also provided some "ground truth" for researchers who study malicious software. Once these researchers had a list of which defects the spy agencies had discovered and when, they were able to compare that list of defects that malicious software authors had discovered and exploited in the wild, and estimate the likelihood that a spy agency defect would be independently discovered and abused by the agency's enemies, who they were supposed to be protecting us from. It turns out that the rediscovery rate for spy agency bugs is about 20% per year – in other words, there's a one in five chance that a bug that the CIA or NSA is hoarding will be used to attack America and Americans within the year.
NOBUS is a form of software alchemy. Alchemy is the pre-Enlightenment version of scientific inquiry, and it resembles science in many respects: an alchemist observes phenomena in the natural world, hypothesizes a causal relationship to explain them, and performs an experiment to test their hypothesis. But here is where the resemblance ends: where the scientist must publish their results for them to count as science, the alchemists kept their findings to themselves. This meant that alchemists were able to trick themselves into thinking they were right, including about things they were very wrong about, like whether drinking mercury was a good idea. The failure to publish meant that every alchemist had to discover, for themself, that mercury was a deadly poison.
Alchemists never figured out how to transform lead into gold, but they did convert the base metal of superstition into the precious metal of science by putting it through the crucible of disclosure and peer-review. Both open source and free software partisans claim transparency as a key virtue of their system, because transparency leads to improvement ("with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow").
At the outset, "open source" and "free software" were synonyms. All code that was open was also free, and vice-versa. But over the ensuing decades, that changed, as Benjamin "Mako" Hill explained in his 2018 Libreplanet keynote, "How markets coopted free software’s most powerful weapon":
As Hill explains, the philosophical differences between "open" (making better code) and "free" (making code to enhance human freedom) may not have mattered at the outset, but they each served as a kind of pole star for its own adherents, leading them down increasingly divergent paths. Each new technology and practice represented a decision-point for the movement: "Is this something we should embrace as compatible with our project, or should we reject it as antithetical to our goals?" If you were an "open source" person, the question you asked yourself at each juncture was, "Does this new thing increase code-quality?" If you were a "free software" person, the question you had to answer was, "Does this make people more free?"
These value judgments carried enormous weight. They influenced whether hackers would work to improve a given package or pursue a use-case; they determined who would speak or exhibit at conferences, they created (or deflated) "buzz," and they influenced the direction that new license versions would take, and whether those licenses would be permissible on influential software distribution channels. For a movement that runs on goodwill as much as on dollars, the social acceptability of a practice, a license, a technology or a person, mattered.
Hill describes how chasing openness without regard to its consequences for freedom created a strange situation, one in which giant tech monopolists have software freedom, while the rest of us have to make do with open source. All the software that powers the cloud systems of Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc, is freely licensed. You can download it from Github. You can inspect it to your heart's content. You can even do volunteer work to improve it.
But only Google, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook get to decide whether to run it, and how to configure it. And since nearly all the code our users depend on takes a loop through a Big Tech cloud, the decisions made by these Big Tech firms set the outer boundaries of what our code can do. They have total freedom while we make do with the crumbs they drop from on high.
In other words, the freedom mattered, and when we forgot about it, we lost it.
Which is not to say that free software doesn't benefit from open source's popularity. The vast cohort of people who have been won over by open source's instrumental claims to superior code are the top of a funnel that free software partisans can operate to convince these people to consider the ways that their lives have been made more free through open code, and to prioritize freedom, even ahead of code quality.
The free/open source movement is actually a coalition of people who share some goals even if they differ on others. Coalitions are politically powerful. Nearly everything that happens, happens because a coalition has been pulled together:
But coalitions are also brittle, because after they get what they want (transparency for code), then they have to resolve their differences, which means that some members of the coalition are going to be bitterly disappointed.
After all, there's code that we don't want to make better – at least, not if we care about human freedom. For example: code that helps ICE kidnap our neighbors. Code that powers drones. Code that spies on us, both for governments and for private-sector snoops, like the data-broker industry. Code that helps genocidiers target Gazans. Code that helps defeat adblockers. Code that helps locate new sites for fossil fuel extraction, and code that helps run fossil fuel extraction operations. Human freedom has an inverse relationship to this code: the better this code is, the worse off we all are.
Periodically, some free software advocate will follow this to its logical conclusion and propose a new free software license that prohibits use for some purpose: "you may not use my code in the military," or "you may not use my code for ad-tech," or "you may not use my code in ways that despoil the environment."
It's not surprising that this is a recurring event. After all, if you care about software as a tool for enhancing human freedom, and you notice that your code is being used to make people less free, it's natural to want to do something about it.
And yet, every one of these efforts have foundered – and I think every one will. This isn't because ethics clauses in license are a foolish idea, but because they are logistically transcendentally hard to get right.
First, there is the problem of writing good "legal code." Free software licenses are extraordinarily hard to get right. Not only do the terms have to spell out the rights and obligations of participants in the software project, but the whole system needs to be designed so that these clauses can be enforced. The right to sue for breaching a license is determined by "standing" – only people who have been injured by a license violation have the right to seek justice in court. This has proven to be a serious technical challenge in free software licensing, and if you screw it up, you'll end up with an unenforceable license:
Even if you figure out all that stuff, it's possible for even extremely talented lawyers working in collaboration with the most ethical of technologists to make subtle errors that take years or decades to surface. By that time, there might be millions or even billions of works that have been released under the defective version of the license, and no practical way to contact the creators of all those works to get them to relicense under a patched version of the license.
This isn't a hypothetical risk: for more than a decade, every version of every flavor of Creative Commons license had a tiny (but hugely consequential) defect. These licenses specified that they "terminated immediately upon any breach." That meant that if you made even the tiniest of errors in following the license terms, you were instantly stripped of the protections of the CC license and could be sued for copyright infringement. Many billions of works were released under these older CC licenses.
Today, a new kind of predator called a "copyleft troll" exploits this bug in order to blackmail innocent Creative Commons users. Multimillion dollar robolawyer firms like Pixsy represent copyleft trolls who release timely images under ancient CC licenses in the hopes that bloggers, social media users, small businesses and nonprofits will use them and make a tiny error in the way they attribute the image. Then Pixsy helps the troll extort hundreds or thousands of dollars from each victim, under threat of a statutory damages claim of $150,000 per infringement:
Creative Commons spent millions over years, working with a who's-who of international copyright and licensing experts, and it took them more than a decade to fix this bug, and the billions of works released under the old licenses are ticking time-bombs. After all, the copyright in those works will last for 70 years after their authors die, which means that anyone who acquires the copyright to those older images could turn troll and go hunting.
There's a reason that old FLOSS hands react with instant derision whenever someone proposes making up a new software license. It's the same reason cryptographers are so hostile to the idea of people rolling their own ciphers: no matter how smart and well-intentioned you are, there's a high likelihood that you will screw up and irrevocably place innocent people at risk. Yes, irrevocably: getting all those creators to relicense their works under a modern CC license is effectively impossible. Even projects with a relatively small number of contributors – like Mozilla – had to resort to throwing away chunks of code whose authors couldn't be located and paying someone to rewrite them under a new license.
Those are reasons not to come up with new free and/or open licenses, period. But on top of that, there's a special set of perplexities and confounders that arise when ethics clauses are added to free/open licenses.
The first of these is the definitional problem. Even seemingly simple categories can elude consensus on definition. Again, the Creative Commons licenses are instructive here: from the outset, CC licenses let creators toggle an ethics clause, called the "NonCommercial" (NC) flag. Works licensed under "NC" couldn't be used commercially. Seems simple, right?
Wrong. For years – and to this day – CC creators and users have been unable to consistently agree on what constitutes a "commercial use." If you post something, in your personal capacity, to a commercial service, is that "commercial?" Well, it had better not be, because anything you find online is going to have some kind of commercial enterprise involved in getting that file to you: a long-haul fiber provider, a data-center, a hosting company, a cloud company, a social media service, etc, etc. If "noncommercial" means "no one can make any money as a result of the distribution of this work," then an NC license would mean that works couldn't be distributed at all (even if you're just printing off copies of a cool image at home and stapling them to telephone poles, the printer ink company and the staple company are making money off of every copy you post).
The CC organization did extensive polling, conducted seminars, consulted experts, and produced a 255-page document that is fascinating and subtle:
And even with this document, CC users and creators still argue about whether some users are in and out of bounds.
Now, the CC NC ethics clause is the best case for an ethics clause in a license. CC is a centralized organization that has total authority over the text of CC licenses and exercises near-total control over their interpretation.
Now imagine how a hypothetical ethics clause in a software license would perform, given the CC NC experience. Compared with, say, "military/nonmilitary," the "commercial/noncommercial" distinction is trivial to draw. Is Ford – whose cars are in DoD motor-pools – a "military" user? What if Ford decides to boycott the Pentagon, but the Navy still buys a bunch of used Ford Focuses from a wrecking yard and fixes them up with Ford parts they buy at an Autozone: does Ford now become a "military" user of free/open software?
Categories are clusters, not shapes. This is why the right wing troll mantra "What is a woman?" is so effective: women aren't whats; they are whos, and if you try to come up with a definition that encompasses all the people who are women, it will stretch to dozen of pages and still miss people out. This isn't unique to women – almost every category defies exhaustive definition. Famously, there is no such thing as a fish:
Neither is there any such thing as a name, an address or a date:
https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood
Obviously, the fact that "name" is a slippery concept doesn't stop us from introducing ourselves and referring to one another. But imagine now that we are going to create billions of works whose copyright will endure for more than a century, and if any of them fails to refer to someone by their name correctly, then any of millions of people, some of them not even born yet, could ruin some software contributor's life and maybe the lives of thousand or millions of users of their software.
And "name" – like "noncommercial" – is an easy case. The hard cases are things like "military/nonmilitary," "fossil fuel-sector/non-fossil fuel sector" etc etc. Big, distributed projects with informal institutions and leaders are poorly suited to adjudicating any of these definitional questions, but toothy ethics clauses require these loose ad-hocracies to create and enforce definitions of the most pernicious and slippery concepts of all.
I want to be clear that I'm not opposed to the idea of an ethics clause in free/open licenses. I make extensive use of both the NC and commercial CC licenses, after all. My objections are practical, not philosophical.
A couple weeks ago, I traveled to Rochdale in Greater Manchester to give the opening keynote at the 2025 Coop Congress. After my talk, I was on a panel with Chris Croome, who has been campaigning for a co-op software license:
either enforce co-operation and sharing and do not allow code to be privatised (made proprietary) or code that is released under terms that dictate that if the code is used to run a business the nature of the business must be a co-operative.
I've been thinking about this ever since and I think all my concerns about other ethics clauses apply here. Admittedly, there is a widely accepted and mature definition of "co-op," the seven "Rochdale Principles":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rochdale_Principles
These have been around since 1937, and many of the seeming ambiguities in the language have been resolved through debate over the past 88 years. But there are plenty of entities that are recognizable as "co-ops" that exist outside of the UK, the Anglosphere and the global north that don't embrace all of these principles, or embrace them in ways that fit into the consensus as to their meaning that has emerged among Rochdale-derived co-ops. It's not merely that a "co-op" license might exclude these co-ops, but also that the enforcement mechanism for software licenses is that individual software authors retain the copyright to their lines of code, and use copyright law to threaten and punish people who violate the license terms.
This means that you could have a pool of potentially thousands of software authors, and their literary estates, who would have the right – for more than a century – to attack co-ops that use "co-operatively licensed" software on the grounds that the differ in their interpretation of what is – and is not – a co-op.
What's more, there are plenty of groups that could organize as a co-op and satisfy the software license's definition, who might nevertheless not be "ethical" by the lights of the co-op movement. Think of a firm of mercenaries that set up as a worker co-op (if this strikes you as implausible, I remind you that the most vicious, human-rights-abusing cops in the world are mostly members of "unions").
So a co-op license creates three risks:
Excluding co-operators because of small differences in which co-op principles they adopt;
ii. Including co-operators who are structured as compliant co-ops, but do terrible things; and
iii. Putting license users at the risk of copyleft trolls who exploit ambiguity in the definition of "co-op" to extort massive "settlement fees" from software users.
That all said, a co-op license has positive aspects as well. Remember what happened when we stopped stressing "freedom" in our software licenses: we got the code quality of "open," applied to all kinds of code, including code that destroys freedom. I've been involved with co-ops since I was a pre-teen, and I've experienced firsthand what happens when a co-op forgets its ethical basis in favor of instrumental goals.
Take the Mountain Equipment Co-Op, Canada's most beloved and successful consumer co-op. MEC was inspired by the US outdoor gear co-op REI, and it served Canadians proudly for decades. But like most consumer co-ops, MEC had very low member involvement, so a cabal of MBA-poisoned looters were able to take over MEC's board, change the bylaws, and then flip the co-op to a ruthless American private equity fund:
MEC isn't a co-op anymore. The board's argument was that keeping MEC a co-op wasn't as important as infusing it with capital so it could source the goods its members wanted and offer them at reasonable prices. Joke's on them: after five years of PE looting, MEC's quality sucks and its prices are sky-high.
Institutional structure (like whether you are a co-op or not) can influence the kind of activity an organization engages in, but it can't control it. Keeping enshittification at bay requires multiple, overlapping constraints that prevent the institution from caving into the worst instincts of its worst members. That's why I'm rooting for Bluesky to become more federated. It's nice that they're structured as a B-corp, but that alone won't stop a dedicated investor class from replacing the current management with enshittifiers who destroy the lives of tens of millions of Bluesky users. However, if a large plurality of Bluesky users weren't actually on Bluesky, but on federated servers, they could credibly threaten Bluesky's business by defederating with it if it enshittified:
So maybe the prospect of losing access to all of its business-critical software could have acted as a check on MEC's board and prevented them from sleazing up to private equity vampires. This is certainly a possible benefit to a co-op ethics clause in a software license. I'm not convinced that it outweighs the risks, though.
I'm a free software person. There are bitter free software partisans who think that the open source people stole our revolution. I understand their outrage. But I also think we left an open goal. In retrospect, choosing a deliberately confusing name in the hopes of sparking conversations was a tactical error. The cohort of potential movement supporters who also enjoy word-games is smaller than the cohort who are put off by being deliberately confused.
I also don't think it's a problem that the software freedom coalition includes people who value software freedom for purely instrumental reasons – because open code is better code. I do think it's a problem that they are the senior partners in the coalition and have steered it for a quarter-century. After all, they steered it into this ditch where tech monopolists have free software and we all make do with open source.
Coalitions, though, are hugely important. Take the as-yet-nameless coalition lined up against corporate power, which has defied political science's laws of gravity, pushing antitrust enforcement across the world, against the world's largest and most powerful corporations:
This coalition needs a name. I often cite James Boyle's explanation of the role the word "ecology" played in bringing together thousands of disparate issues (spotted owls, ozone depletion) under a single banner and turning them into a movement. The anti-corporate-power movement doesn't have a name that can unite labor, climate, environment, antitrust, anticorruption, antigenocide, antiracist, antisexist, antitransphobic groups under one banner. Almost all of our definitional terms are "anti-something," from "antitrust" to "antifascist." We have no end of words to describe what we stand against (even "enshittification"'s opposite is "disenshittification"), but we still lack a word to express what we're for.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
On September 22, I'm (virtually) presenting at the DIG Festival in Modena, Italy. On September 27, I'll be at Chevalier's Books in Los Angeles with Brian Merchant for a joint launch for my new book The Internet Con and his new book, Blood in the Machine.
It's been 21 years since Bill Willingham launched Fables, his 110-issue, wide-ranging, delightful and brilliantly crafted author-owned comic series that imagines that the folkloric figures of the world's fairytales are real people, who live in a secret society whose internal struggles and intersections with the mundane world are the source of endless drama.
Fables is a DC Comics title; DC is division of the massive entertainment conglomerate Warners, which is, in turn, part of the Warner/Discovery empire, a rapacious corporate behemoth whose screenwriters have been on strike for 137 days (and counting). DC is part of a comics duopoly; its rival, Marvel, is a division of the Disney/Fox juggernaut, whose writers are also on strike.
The DC that Willingham bargained with at the turn of the century isn't the DC that he bargains with now. Back then, DC was still subject to a modicum of discipline from competition; its corporate owner's shareholders had not yet acquired today's appetite for meteoric returns on investment of the sort that can only be achieved through wage-theft and price-gouging.
In the years since, DC – like so many other corporations – participated in an orgy of mergers as its sector devoured itself. The collapse of comics into a duopoly owned by studios from an oligopoly had profound implications for the entire sector, from comic shops to comic cons. Monopoly breeds monopoly, and the capture of the entire comics distribution system by a single company – Diamond – was attended by the capture of the entire digital comics market by a single company, Amazon, who enshittified its Comixology division, driving creators and publishers into Kindle Direct Publishing, a gig-work platform that replicates the company's notoriously exploitative labor practices for creative workers. Today, Comixology is a ghost-town, its former employees axed in a mass layoff earlier this year:
When giant corporations effect these mergers, they do so with a kind of procedural kabuki, insisting that they are dotting every i and crossing every t, creating a new legal entity whose fictional backstory is a perfect, airtight bubble, a canon with not a single continuity bug. This performance of seriousness is belied by the behind-the-scenes chaos that these corporate shifts entail – think of the way that the banks that bought and sold our mortgages in the run-up to the 2008 crisis eventually lost the deeds to our houses, and then just pretended they were legally entitled to collect money from us every month – and steal our houses if we refused to pay:
Or think of the debt collection industry, which maintains a pretense of careful record-keeping as the basis for hounding and threatening people, but which is, in reality, a barely coherent trade in spreadsheets whose claims to our money are matters of faith:
For usury, the chaos is a feature, not a bug. Their corporate strategists take the position that any ambiguity should be automatically resolved in their favor, with the burden of proof on accused debtors, not the debt collectors. The scumbags who lost your deed and stole your house say that it's up to you to prove that you own it. And since you've just been rendered homeless, you don't even have a house to secure a loan you might use to pay a lawyer to go to court.
It's not solely that the usurers want to cheat you – it's that they can make more money if they don't pay for meticulous record-keeping, and if that means that they sometimes cheat us, that's our problem, not theirs.
While this is very obvious in the usury sector, it's also true of other kinds of massive mergers that create unfathomnably vast conglomerates. The "curse of bigness" is real, but who gets cursed is a matter of power, and big companies have a lot more power.
The chaos, in other words, is a feature and not a bug. It provides cover for contract-violating conduct, up to and including wage-theft. Remember when Disney/Marvel stole money from beloved science fiction giant Alan Dean Foster, whose original Star Wars novelization was hugely influential on George Lucas, who changed the movie to match Foster's ideas?
Disney claimed that when it acquired Lucasfilm, it only acquired its assets, but not its liabilities. That meant that while it continued to hold Foster's license to publish his novel, they were not bound by an obligation to pay Foster for this license, since that liability was retained by the (now defunct) original company:
For Disney, this wage-theft (and many others like it, affecting writers with less fame and clout than Foster) was greatly assisted by the chaos of scale. The chimera of Lucas/Disney had no definitive responsible party who could be dragged into a discussion. The endless corporate shuffling that is normal in giant companies meant that anyone who might credibly called to account for the theft could be transfered or laid off overnight, with no obvious successor. The actual paperwork itself was hard for anyone to lay hands on, since the relevant records had been physically transported and re-stored subsequent to the merger. And, of course, the company itself was so big and powerful that it was hard for Foster and his agent to raise a credible threat.
I've experienced versions of this myself: every book contract I've ever signed stipulated that my ebooks could not be published with DRM. But one of my publishers – a boutique press that published my collection Overclocked – collapsed along with most of its competitors, the same week my book was published (its distributor, Publishers Group West, went bankrupt after its parent company, Advanced Marketing Services, imploded in a shower of fraud and criminality).
The publisher was merged with several others, and then several more, and then several more – until it ended up a division of the Big Five publisher Hachette, who repeatedly, "accidentally" pushed my book into retail channels with DRM. I don't think Hachette deliberately set out to screw me over, but the fact that Hachette is (by far) the most doctrinaire proponent of DRM meant that when the chaos of its agglomerated state resulted in my being cheated, it was a happy accident.
(The Hachette story has a happy ending; I took the book back from them and sold it to Blackstone Publishing, who brought out a new expanded edition to accompany a DRM-free audiobook and ebook):
Willingham, too, has been affected by the curse of bigness. The DC he bargained with at the outset of Fables made a raft of binding promises to him: he would have approval over artists and covers and formats for new collections, and he would own the "IP" for the series, meaning the copyrights vested in the scripts, storylines, characters (he might also have retained rights to some trademarks).
But as DC grew, it made mistakes. Willingham's hard-fought, unique deal with the publisher was atypical. A giant publisher realizes its efficiencies through standardized processes. Willingham's books didn't fit into that standard process, and so, repeatedly, the publisher broke its promises to him.
At first, Willingham's contacts at the publisher were contrite when he caught them at this. In his press-release on the matter, Willingham calls them "honest men and women of integrity [who] interpreted the details of that agreement fairly and above-board":
But as the company grew larger, these counterparties were replaced by corporate cogs who were ever-more-distant from his original, creator-friendly deal. What's more, DC's treatment of its other creators grew shabbier at each turn (a dear friend who has written for DC for decades is still getting the same page-rate as they got in the early 2000s), so Willingham's deal grew more exceptional as time went by. That meant that when Willingham got the "default" treatment, it was progressively farther from what his contract entitled him to.
The company repeatedly – and conveniently – forgot that Willingham had the final say over the destiny of his books. They illegally sublicensed a game adapted from his books, and then, when he objected, tried to make renegotiating his deal a condition of being properly compensated for this theft. Even after he won that fight, the company tried to cheat him and then cover it up by binding him to a nondisclosure agreement.
This was the culmination of a string of wage-thefts in which the company misreported his royalties and had to be dragged into paying him his due. When the company "practically dared" Willingham to sue ("knowing it would be a long and debilitating process") he snapped.
Rather than fight Warner, Willingham has embarked on what JWZ calls an act of "absolute table-flip badassery" – he has announced that Fables will hereafter be in the public domain, available for anyone to adapt commercially, in works that compete with whatever DC might be offering.
Now, this is huge, and it's also shrewd. It's the kind of thing that will bring lots of attention on Warner's fraudulent dealings with its creative workforce, at a moment where the company is losing a public relations battle to the workers picketing in front of its gates. It constitutes a poison pill that is eminently satisfying to contemplate. It's delicious.
But it's also muddy. Willingham has since clarified that his public domain dedication means that the public can't reproduce the existing comics. That's not surprising; while Willingham doesn't say so, it's vanishingly unlikely that he owns the copyrights to the artwork created by other artists (Willingham is also a talented illustrator, but collaborated with a who's-who of comics greats for Fables). He may or may not have control over trademarks, from the Fables wordmark to any trademark interests in the character designs. He certainly doesn't have control over the trademarked logos for Warner and DC that adorn the books.
When Willingham says he is releasing the "IP" to his comic, he is using the phrase in its commercial sense, not its legal sense. When business people speak of "owning IP," they mean that they believe they have the legal right to control the conduct of their competitors, critics and customers:
https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/
The problem is that this doesn't correspond to the legal concept of IP, because IP isn't actually a legal concept. While there are plenty of "IP lawyers" and even "IP law firms," there is no "IP law." There are many laws that are lumped together under "IP," including the big three (trademark, copyright and patent), but also a bestiary of obscure cousins and subspecies – trade dress, trade secrecy, service marks, noncompetes, nondisclosues, anticirumvention rights, sui generis "neighboring rights" and so on.
The job of an "IP lawyer" is to pluck individual doctrines from this incoherent scrapheap of laws and regulations and weave them together into a spider's web of tripwires that customers and critics and competitors can't avoid, and which confer upon the lawyer's client the right to sue for anything that displeases them.
When Willingham says he's releasing Fables into the public domain, it's not clear what he's releasing – and what is his to release. In the colloquial, business sense of "IP," saying you're "releasing the IP" means something like, "Feel free to create adaptations from this." But these adaptations probably can't draw too closely on the artwork, or the logos. You can probably make novelizations of the comics. Maybe you can make new comics that use the same scripts but different art. You can probably make sequels to, or spinoffs of, the existing comics, provided you come up with your own character designs.
But it's murky. Very murky. Remember, this all started because Willingham didn't have the resources or patience to tangle with the rabid attack-lawyers Warners keeps kenneled on its Burbank lot. Warners can (and may) release those same lawyers on you, even if you are likely to prevail in court, betting that you – like Willingham – won't have the resources to defend yourself.
The strange reality of "IP" rights is that they can be secured without any affirmative step on your part. Copyrights are conjured into existence the instant that a new creative work is fixed in a tangible medium and endure until the creator's has been dead for 70 years. Common-law trademarks gradually come into definition like an image appearing on photo-paper in a chemical soup, growing in definition every time they are used, even if the mark's creator never files a form with the USPTO.
These IP tripwires proliferate in the shadows, wherever doodles are sketched on napkins, wherever kindergartners apply finger-paint to construction-paper. But for all that they are continuously springing into existence, and enduring for a century or more, they are absurdly hard to give away.
This was the key insight behind the Creative Commons project: that while the internet was full of people saying "no copyright" (or just assuming the things they posted were free for others to use), the law was a universe away from their commonsense assumptions. Creative Commons licenses were painstakingly crafted by an army of international IP lawyers who set out to turn the normal IP task on its head – to create a legal document that assured critics, customers and competitors that the licensor had no means to control their conduct.
20 years on, these licenses are pretty robust. The flaws in earlier versions have been discovered and repaired in subsequent revisions. They have been adapted to multiple countries' legal systems, allowing CC users to mix-and-match works from many territories – animating Polish sprites to tell a story by a Canadian, set to music from the UK.
Willingham could clarify his "public domain" dedication by applying a Creative Commons license to Fables, but which license? That's a thorny question. What Willingham really wants here is a sampling license – a license that allows licensees to take some of the elements of his work, combine them with other parts, and make something new.
But no CC license fits that description. Every CC license applies to whole works. If you want to license the bass-line from your song but not the melody, you have to release the bass-line separately and put a CC license on that. You can't just put a CC license on the song with an asterisked footnote that reads "just the bass, though."
CC had a sampling license: the "Sampling Plus 1.0" license. It was a mess. Licensees couldn't figure out what parts of works they were allowed to use, and licensors couldn't figure out how to coney that. It's been "retired."
So maybe Willingham should create his own bespoke license for Fables. That may be what he has to do, in fact. But boy is that a fraught business. Remember the army of top-notch lawyers who created the CC licenses? They missed a crucial bug in the first three versions of the license, and billions of works have been licensed under those earlier versions. This has enabled a mob of crooked copyleft trolls (like Pixsy) to prey on the unwary, raking in a fortune:
Making a bug-free license is hard. A failure on Willingham's part to correctly enumerate or convey the limitations of such a license – to list which parts of Fables DC might sue you for using – could result in downstream users having their hard work censored out of existence by legal threats. Indeed, that's the best case scenario – defects in a license could result in downstream users, their collaborators, investors, and distributors being sued for millions of dollars, costing them everything they have, up to and including their homes.
Which isn't to say that this is dead on arrival – far from it! Just that there is work to be done. I can't speak for Creative Commons (it's been more than 20 years since I was their EU Director), but I'm positive that there are copyfighting lawyers out there who'd love to work on a project like this.
I think Willingham is onto something here. After all, Fables is built on the public domain. As Willingham writes in his release: "The current laws are a mishmash of unethical backroom deals to keep trademarks and copyrights in the hands of large corporations, who can largely afford to buy the outcomes they want."
Willingham describes how his participation in the entertainment industry has made him more skeptical of IP, not less. He proposes capping copyright at 20 years, with a single, 10-year extension for works that are sold onto third parties. This would be pretty good industrial policy – almost no works are commercially viable after just 14 years:
But there are massive structural barriers to realizing such a policy, the biggest being that the US had tied its own hands by insisting that long copyright terms be required in the trade deals it imposed on other countries, thereby binding itself to these farcically long copyright terms.
But there is another policy lever American creators can and should yank on to partially resolve this: Termination. The 1976 Copyright Act established the right for any creator to "terminate" the "transfer" of any copyrighted work after 30 years, by filing papers with the Copyright Office. This process is unduly onerous, and the Authors Alliance (where I'm a volunteer advisor) has created a tool to simplify it:
Termination is deliberately obscure, but it's incredibly powerful. The copyright scholar Rebecca Giblin has studied this extensively, helping to produce the most complete report on how termination has been used by creators of all types:
Writers, musicians and other artists have used termination to unilaterally cancel the crummy deals they had crammed down their throats 30 years ago and either re-sell their works on better terms or make them available directly to the public. Every George Clinton song, every Sweet Valley High novel, and the early works of Steven King have all be terminated and returned to their creators.
Copyright termination should and could be improved. Giblin and I wrote a whole-ass book about this and related subjects, Chokepoint Capitalism, which not only details the scams that writers like Willingham are subject to, but also devotes fully half its length to presenting detailed, technical, shovel-ready proposals for making life better for creators:
https://chokepointcapitalism.com/
Willingham is doing something important here. Larger and larger entertainment firms offer shabbier and shabbier treatment to creative workers, as striking members of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA can attest. Over the past year, I've seen a sharp increase in the presence of absolutely unconscionable clauses in the contracts I'm offered by publishers:
I'm six months into negotiating a contract for a 300 word piece I wrote for a magazine I started contributing to in 1992. At issue is that they insist that I assign film rights and patent rights from my work as a condition of publication. Needless to say, there are no patentable inventions nor film ideas in this article, but they refuse to vary the contract, to the obvious chagrin of the editor who commissioned me.
Why won't they grant a variance? Why, they are so large – the magazine is part of a global conglomerate – that it would be impractical for them to track exceptions to this completely fucking batshit clause. In other words: we can't strike this batshit clause because we decided that from now on, all out contracts will have batshit clauses.
The performance of administrative competence – and the tactical deployment of administrative chaos – among giant entertainment companies is grotesque, but every now and again, it backfires.
That's what's happening at Marvel right now. The estates of Marvel founder Stan Lee and its seminal creator Steve Ditko are suing Marvel to terminate the transfer of both creators' characters to Marvel. If they succeed, Marvel will lose most of its most profitable characters, including Iron Man:
They're following in the trail of the Jack Kirby estate, whom Marvel paid millions to rather than taking their chances with the Supreme Court.
Marvel was always an administrative mess, repeatedly going bankrupt. Its deals with its creators were indifferently papered over, and then Marvel lost a lot of the paperwork. I'd bet anything that many of the key documents Disney (Marvel's owner) needs to prevail over Lee and Ditko are either unlocatable or destroyed – or never existed in the first place.
A more muscular termination right – say, one that kicks in after 20 years, and is automatic – would turn circuses like Marvel-Lee/Ditko into real class struggles. Rather than having the heirs of creators reaping the benefit of termination, we could make termination into a system for getting creators themselves paid.
In the meantime, there's Willingham's "absolute table-flip badassery."
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Copyleft Trolls Are the Serpents in Our Garden of Ethical Sharing.
Record executives didn’t just shoot themselves in the foot, they shot themselves in the face, over and over again. They got (nominally) advanced democracies to pass laws that would permanently terminate your whole family’s internet connection if anyone in your household was accused of illegal downloading.
The argued that any service that allowed you to search for music by the artist’s name should be banned. They told people they were fools to expect to be able to buy digital tracks and play them forever, defending the idea that the music you buy should simply expire off your hard-drive in a couple of years. And when academics criticized them online, they tried to get them fired from their universities.
And more than anything, they sued music fans. They sued and sued and sued. At one point, one in fifty federal cases in the USA was a record company suing a fan. They weren’t just looking for money, either. The RIAA wanted to send a message — which is why they demanded that one of their targets drop out of his Computer Science major as a condition of the settlement: people like you shouldn’t learn how to program computers.
-Commafuckers Versus The Commons: Copyleft Trolls Are the Serpents in Our Garden of Ethical Sharing
Today’s a big day for users of Creative Commons images: Flickr has declared zero tolerance for copyleft trolls, predators who exploit a bug in out-of-date versions of the CC licenses in order to threaten good-faith users of CC images who make minor errors in the way they credit the images.
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
First things first: Flickr’s new community guidelines prohibit copyleft trolling: “Failure to allow a good faith reuser the opportunity to correct errors is against the intent of the license and not in line with the values of our community, and can result in your account being removed.”
https://www.flickr.com/help/guidelines
If you are targeted by a copyleft troll who demands that you pay them because of minor errors in your Creative Commons attribution, here’s how to report them and get them kicked off Flickr forever:
Now, some background. Early versions of the Creative Commons licenses have a bug, a clause that says that the permissions conferred by CC licenses “terminate automatically upon any breach” — that is, if you violate any term of the license, it ceases to be in effect:
Core to the CC licenses is the idea of attribution. When you use a Creative Commons image, you must name the creator and link to the original, and name the license and link to it. Many CC users don’t understand this; they use an image and add something like “Image: Cory Doctorow/Creative Commons” with no links or specific licenses.
Under the pre-4.0 versions of the license, this can be construed as a “breach” which “terminates” the CC license. That’s where the copyleft trolls come in.
Copyleft trolls post CC-licensed stock art and then wait for a naive person to make a minor attribution error, and then they pounce, sending a legal threat and a speculative invoice demanding hundreds or thousands of dollars, under the threat of a $150,000 statutory damages award.
This is deeply unethical conduct. As I wrote when I was targeted by one of these creeps:
If you put a CC license on your work, its explicit message is, “I want you to re-use this.” Not “I am a pedantic asshole with a fetish for well-formed attribution strings.” The point of CC is not to teach the world to write attribution strings: it is to facilitate sharing and re-use. If you are a good-faith user of CC licenses, then your response to an incorrect attribution string should be a request to correct it, not a threat to sue for $150,000 in statutory damages.
Unethical as this conduct is, it’s also big business. One company, Pixsy, is responsible for a long-running shakedown campaign, working with scammy photographers to send out demand letters to unsuspecting Creative Commons users.
And many of those photographers rely on Flickr to bait their traps.
There’s a reason for this. Flickr’s early years were a period of enormous innovation. Flickr was the first mobile photo-sharing site, and it invented numerous community features that turned it into a thriving hub for photographers, amateur and professional alike. Flickr was also an interoperability pioneer, offering an API that let any user move their photos to a rival service — a tacit pledge to keep your business by being better than the rest, not by locking you in.
I know all this because I was an early advisor to Flickr, and because, in a weird way, I am partially responsible for Flickr. You see, before Flickr, I was carrying on a long-distance relationship from San Francisco with a woman in London, and we were both alpha testers for a social game called GameNeverending.
One day over breakfast with GNE’s founder Stewart Butterfield, he asked me how things were going in my romantic life. I answered that things were great, but mentioned that my girlfriend and I were struggling to share the pictures we took in our daily lives with one another. Stewart said, “Well, there’s a photo-sharing feature for GNE on the roadmap — why don’t I bump it up and we’ll see if other people use it, too?”
They did. In fact, the feature was so popular that within a few months, GNE relaunched as Flickr, jettisoning the game entirely and focusing on just that one feature. I stayed on the advisory, and one of the things I encouraged was the plan to roll out Creative Commons licenses for Flickr images — and I made sure everyone knew about it when Flickr became the first CC-enabled image site.
(I also married the woman I was carrying on that long-distance relationship with and today we have a 15 year old daughter!)
But after Flickr was sold to Yahoo, it joined Yahoo’s haunted armada of Web 2.0 ghost-ships, tossed back and forth in the storms created by the dueling princelings of Yahoo’s bloated management layer, who spent more time sabotaging one another than they did making anything anyone else wanted to use. Yahoo eventually sold off all of those holdings at fire-sale prices to Verizon, who neglected them still further.
An abandoned ship is easy picking for the rats that live in its bilges. Pixsy and its photographers actually became official Flickr partners, pitching themselves as a way for photographers who didn’t want their images shared to hunt down infringers — even as they facilitated a revolting campaign of copyleft trolling that depended on Flickr as their base of operations.
The depravity of copyleft trolls is truly boundless. Take Marco Verch, a prolific copyleft troll who hosts nearly 47,000 photos on Flickr. Verch hires low-waged gig work photographers through platforms like Upwork to take photos, then harasses people who make minor attribution errors:
Verch boasts that his predation lets him work for four hours a week, leaving him with ample time to focus on his hobby, running. Verch is a truly prolific predator, and his attacks have made untold numbers of victims miserable — including the small Dutch charity that was forced to shut down after paying his ransom demand. Pixsy has been Verch’s US counsel and filed dozens of suits on his behalf.
Back in 2021, I got hit by Pixsy on behalf of a photographer named Nenad Stojkovic, with a claim that I had failed to attribute his image correctly. The email threat was truly vicious, calculated to strike terror into the recipient’s heart and prompt swift payment of $600, for using a freely licensed image whose market value had been set by its creator at $0.00.
There was just one problem: I hadn’t flubbed the attribution string. I helped with the launch of Creative Commons. I was CC’s first European director. What’s more, I have decades of experience fighting bullies and trolls and I knew their threat was bullshit — no court would award them the damages they were seeking.
So I wrote about it, publishing the text of my correspondence with Pixsy’s staff and management, and calling on Flickr to make changes to prevent their tools from being abused to victimize innocent people, like forcing users with CC 2.0-licensed images to relicense them as CC 4.0, which guarantees users the right to 30 days to fix attribution strings.
The reason I thought Flickr might take this in hand is that it is finally under decent, responsive leadership — since 2018, Flickr has been owned by Smugmug, a family-owned business that really cares about photographers and the open internet.
Flickr hasn’t taken all of my suggestions yet — my understanding is that they are laboring under enormous technological debt thanks to years of neglect by Yahoo and Verizon, and even small changes require weeks of all-hands technological work.
But what they have done is modify their policies to create a de facto CC 4.0 environment for their users, by promising to terminate the accounts of any user who repeatedly threatens legal action over bad attribution strings without first offering a 30-day grace period.
Flickr’s done more than that, actually. For one thing, they ditched Pixsy, severing their relationship with the company (Pixsy still lists them on its “partner” page). They also created the Flickr Foundation, a nonprofit devoted to providing long-term, responsible stewardship for their CC and public domain image respositories:
https://www.flickr.org/
For its part, Creative Commons published an excellent “Statement of Enforcement Principles” for its licenses that unequivocally rejected the way that Pixsy and other copyleft trolls abuse the bug in its older licenses:
In the months since I published my article detailing Pixsy’s attempt to shake me down, two things happened. First, I got a legal threat from Kain Jones, Pixsy’s CEO, who demanded that I get on the phone with him, the the alternative being “escalating things legally”:
Jones also falsely claimed that naming the employees who’d threatened me violated the GDPR, which is extremely on-brand for this whole mess. While I don’t claim to be the world’s greatest expert on GDPR, I did lobby in Brussels for it, and I do have German specialist lawyers on tap who are happy to explain that Jones’s threat is absolute nonsense.
As I noted in my followup to Jones, he seems incapable of interacting with the public or his critics without making legal threats — and not just any legal threats, but legal threats that are grounded in an unhinged, and, in my opinion, deliberately deceptive theories of the law.
Pixsy continued to rattle its sabers for a while after this, tweeting that I’d made errors in my description of its business operations but declining to correct those records in response to my and others’ requests for further detail. It is my opinion that Pixsy failed to correct the record because my accusations were and are substantively correct.
But even after I stopped hearing from Pixsy, I continued to hear from its victims. I routinely receive distraught emails from everyday people who thought they were doing the right thing by using Creative Commons-licensed images in their work, and who now face a remorseless onslaught of threats from Pixsy’s team. Some of these people have been targeted on behalf of Nenad Stojkovic, just as I was.
These people beg me for advice — will Pixsy sue? Can they ignore Pixsy’s demands? I give them my condolences and tell them that I can’t promise them that a company as vindictive, greedy and morally bankrupt as Pixsy won’t bring a lawsuit. Every time, I wish I could offer them more.
Well, now I can: if you are targeted by a copyleft troll for using a Flickr-hosted image, narc them the fuck out. Tell Flickr about them. Flickr no longer tolerates copyleft trolling, and they will terminate repeat offenders’ accounts.
As I wrote this today, I went back and revisted Pixsy CEO Kain Jones’s letter to me and I was struck again by its absolute rank hypocrisy, the sheer sociopathic lack of self-awareness it displays. Jones presides over an empire of bulk legal threats, carefully drafted to frighten blameless people into sending him money they can’t afford and don’t owe. In this correspondence, his company tells its victims that they are liable “regardless of knowledge or intent.” Victims are told that correcting their error will not suffice, because it “does not resolve the period of unlicensed use.”
And yet, in this letter, Jones calls on me to show understanding because “people occasionally make mistakes.” He scolds me for my “vitriol” in my naming and shaming a senior executive who boasts on Pixsy’s website of having “overseen over 140,000 cases” — that is, who sent these outrageous letters to more than one hundred and forty thousand people and organizations.
Unlike Kain Jones, I am a working artist. I make my living from the sale of my creative works, not from tricking people who’ve made innocent, trivial legal errors into sending me hundreds or thousands of dollars. Unlike Marco Verch, I don’t pay anonymous randos small sums to create new works, slap my name on them, and then threaten blameless people in the name of defending artists’ rights.
And I sometimes have to police my copyrights. The world is full of quick-buck scammers who rip off my work, including my Creative Commons-licensed works, often with the assistance of some of the world’s largest corporations:
These people are engaged in what Douglas Rushkoff calls “Going Meta.” They don’t do anything useful, but rather, they create a chokepoint between people who do useful things and people who want to pay for those things, and squatting there, collecting rent:
This is the passive-income brainworm — a parasitic, end-stage capitalist hustle that cloaks itself in high-minded rhetoric even though it is the very lowest of bottom-feeders. Pixsy claims that it is primarily an artists’ defense tool, but the company conspicuously refused to tell me what share of its income comes from real copyright defense, and what share comes from copyleft trolling.
Whenever I think back on Kain Jones and his outrageous legal threats to me — first the one that falsely claimed I had violated a Creative Commons license, and then the one that insinuated that calling him out broke the law — the thing that outrages me most is his assertion that he is a defender of artists’ rights.
What an outrageous and grotesque claim that is. A man who presides over a powerful corporation that devotes its considerable energy to tormenting people who used Creative Commons licenses as they were intended to be used sends a legal threat to a working artist and he styles himself a champion of the arts? If I wrote that into one of my bestselling novels — which generate revenue by making people happy through artistic expression, and not by terrorizing people with deceptive and unethical legal threats — I’d be accused of absurd, overbroad parody.
Have you ever wanted to say thank you for these posts? Here’s how you can: I’m kickstarting the audiobook for my next novel, a post-cyberpunk anti-finance finance thriller about Silicon Valley scams called Red Team Blues. Amazon’s Audible refuses to carry my audiobooks because they’re DRM free, but crowdfunding makes them possible.
[[Image ID: John Milton's 'Fall of Lucifer,' modified so that God's light emanating from heaven is coming out of the Flickr blue-and-red-balls logo.]]
Copyleft Trolls Are the Serpents in Our Garden of Ethical Sharing.
They have come to the garden that we all built with our goodwill and creative labor, a place where all are welcome, and they strewn leg-hold traps all around. This evil, greedy scum stalks our garden, the garden we planted and tended by the million, feasting on the flesh of people whose only crime was to make a minor administrative error.
This is a theory of law that everyone should hate, even the RIAA’s most belligerent student-suers. It’s a practice of law that has more in common with demonology than jurisprudence — a theory straight out of a grimoire where a single mis-chalked rune in your circle of protection unleashes a hellion that escapes to chew your face off.
The Finns have a tremendous name for this mindset: pilkunnussija, which means “commafucker.”
Copyleft Trolls are the commafuckers in our garden.
-Commafuckers Versus The Commons: Copyleft Trolls Are the Serpents in Our Garden of Ethical Sharing
Copyleft Trolls Are the Serpents in Our Garden of Ethical Sharing.
For a creator who wants their work shared, copyright is like one of those sleazy internet subscription offers that you sign up for with a couple of low-friction clicks, but which you can only get out of by spending an afternoon being wheedled over the phone by a customer service rep in a distant call-center.
Actually, it’s worse, because in this case, the “customer service rep” is a copyright lawyer who charges you thousands of dollars just to give away the thing you didn’t want to own in the first place.
Worse still: every person who hopes to make use of your work needs to hire their own copyright lawyer to hunt down hidden gotchas in that license and ensure that you have a well-founded basis to take the creator at their word when they tell you that you’re permitted to use their work as you see fit.
That’s where Creative Commons licenses come in. Anyone who wants to release their work for public re-use need only visit the Creative Commons website and step through a simple process to choose their permissions. Do you want to grant permission for commercial use, or restrict permission to noncommercial users? Do you want to limits re-use to exact copies, or will you permit remixes (“derivative uses,” in copyright jargon)? Can the people who integrate your work into their own creations release them under any terms they chose, or must they also release them under the Creative Commons license as you (“ShareAlike”)?
-Commafuckers Versus The Commons: Copyleft Trolls Are the Serpents in Our Garden of Ethical Sharing
Copyleft Trolls Are the Serpents in Our Garden of Ethical Sharing.
Those of us who were weary of grinding trench warfare of the Napster Wars saw peace in our time, as the number of works in the Commons ballooned, first to millions, then tens of millions, then billions, then tens of billions.
We turned the battlefield into a public park, and people from all walks of life and every part of the world came to that park and planted a garden. It was a true Commons, open to all, carefully tended. In a world of selfishness, greed, belligerence and enmity, the Commons was a beacon of civilization.
Creative Commons’ success was a sign that the internet could be a place of cooperation and collaboration, not just a Big Tech hydraulic press that crushed our social relationships, our creative efforts, and our hopes and dreams until every drop of juice had been extracted, leaving shattered and dry husks behind.
-Commafuckers Versus The Commons: Copyleft Trolls Are the Serpents in Our Garden of Ethical Sharing
