Comment by fluoridation
2 hours ago
That has nothing to do with anything. If you publish a copyleft paper, that doesn't compel someone who makes a product based on your paper to publish more papers.
2 hours ago
That has nothing to do with anything. If you publish a copyleft paper, that doesn't compel someone who makes a product based on your paper to publish more papers.
The GNU RPL (research public license), a viral knowledge license. By reading this paper you are legally obligated to openly publish all vaguely related future research that you perform.
There's already an RPL, incidentally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reciprocal_Public_License
Your RPL wouldn't be enforceable. Copyright doesn't deal with abstract ideas passing through people's minds. Even the GPL is kind of in a gray area because the virality feature and its definition of "derivative work" have never been tested in court, to my knowledge. Maybe under contract law, no idea. If nothing else, I'd love to hear a verdict.
Well it was a joke and is obviously quite silly but I believe it would be enforceable to the extent that the licensor could terminate the agreement and sue for damages. If I can agree to pay you not to talk about something (ie an NDA) or not to work in a field (ie a non-compete clause) then why can't I pay you to be required to publish all future work you do in a given area? ("All future work" might well be overly broad; you'd likely have to restrict it to only a few years but I'm no lawyer.)
I don't believe the GPL is in a grey area. When you license a work all sorts of strings are commonly attached. Rather IIUC no one has gone out of the way to test the GPL largely because it is clearly within bounds, plus any violation has the potential to be a PR disaster since violations are quite literally examples of looting the commons.
2 replies →
Sounds dystopian.