Ethical Licensing for Impact Organisations

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.

Tris Lumley asked:

Anyone thought about adapting Creative Commons licences specifically to enable impact organisations to share content openly for other impact orgs to use and share under the same terms? A bit like a mirror version of the non-commercial licence, but allowing impact orgs to generate revenue and use?

Let’s start with some examples to help illustrate what can be quite a dry subject:

1. An NGO wants to share educational materials with schools and non-profits, but wants corporations to pay.
2. An artist collaborative wants to allow sharing and remixing of their music by other artists, but wants advertisers to pay to license it.
3. A cooperative wants to allow other co-operatives to be able to modify and distribute their 3D printing designs, but wants for-profit manufacturers to pay for licenses and technical support.

What’s wrong with what we’ve got?

Creative Commons licenses like CC BY-NC-SA fall short for our examples in that they restrict all commercial use, including by aligned social enterprises. In other words, they fail to distinguish between “ethical” and “exploitative” use cases.

Thankfully, this problem has not gone unnoticed, with many “reciprocal licensing models” springing up over the last decade or so. A good example of this is the Peer Production License (PPL) which focuses on cooperatives, non-profits, and worker-owned collectives.

It allows commercial use only by organisations where the people creating value also own the “means of production” and the organisation distributes surplus equitably. CivicWise, “an international distributed and open network that promotes citizen engagement,” uses the PPL, as do a few other organisations.

The Peer Production License (PPL) is a license that allows essentially anti-capitalist and non labor-exploitative organizations such as coops, associations, etc access to PPL-licensed cultural resources as a commons. It balances full Copyleft (a la GPL License, normally used in software) and the restrictions placed by Creative Commons Non Commercial Licenses (BY-NC).

PPL-licensed work can be monetized as long as:

1. You are a worker-owned business or worker-owned collective; and
2. all financial gain, surplus, profits and benefits produced by the business or collective are distributed among the worker-owners
3. Any use by a business that is privately owned and managed, and that seeks to generate profit from the labor of employees paid by salary or other wages, is not permitted under this license.

This means that worker-owned coops can practice economic solidarity by permissionlessly allowing other coops to benefit from resources, while capitalists and corporation have to pay license fees for the resources.

Some organisations, though, are a bit wary of going near anything described as “far left” and “anti-capitalist,” especially in the current climate.

Dual licensing?

Dual licensing is, as the name would suggest, explicitly using one license for type of organisation, and another for a different group. It helps make it clear who your target audience is, and the change you’re trying to make in the world.

Returning to our examples:

1. The NGO could could share educational materials via a free tier with educational institutions and NGOs under a Creative Commons BY-SA license. Their paid tier could have custom commercial licenses for corporate training programmes and additional support services.
2. The artist collaborative could share their music with other artists openly via their free tier, using a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. Meanwhile, brands could use the paid tier to pay for full rights and to avoid attribution requirements.
3. The cooperative could distribute their 3D printing designs via a free tier to worker co-ops using the Peer Production License. The paid tier could allow proprietary licensing, including technical support.

I’m not opposed to dual licensing, especially if organisations or networks have access to legal experts who can close potential loopholes. However, how are we defining “impact organisations”? It’s not like pointing to a “cooperative” or “B-Corp” 🤔

Also, organisations like the Free Software Foundation would argue that restrictive licenses actually undermine our freedom. I definitely wouldn’t like to be the person implementing such a strategy, especially if I was doing so in a volunteer role.

Conclusion

The PPL is a legally enforceable alternative to the limitations we have identified with Creative Commons’ licenses. While no license guarantees perfect protection, it does at least provide a foundation for revenue generation and resisting exploitative appropriation.

Ultimately, though, I feel that aligning interests is the best way forward. For example, OBS Studio is free and open source software, but rakes in significant money from supporters as well as through sponsorship from big-hitters such as YouTube, Logitech, and Nvidia.

A license itself is not enough. It’s the processes and procedures around it that are important. I agree that there are licenses that are kryptonite to some organisations (e.g. Google AGPL Policy) but outside of the world of software, I’d say it’s all about intentionality, community coherence, and enforcing social norms. As Seth Godin says, “People like us do things like this.”