Comment by fc417fc802
3 hours ago
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.
3 hours ago
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.
>terminate the agreement
Meaning what? Claw back the ideas from people's minds? You can terminate the agreement in the sense that you revoke access to the paper, but presumably the person you find in breach has already used the research for something that you find them in breach for. You're kind of closing the gate after the horse has bolted.
>sue for damages
I honestly have no idea what damages you could claim from not publishing research. I think you would need to set a value ahead of time on the agreement.
>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?
Not sure why you added the word "pay" to your clauses, but anyway. The reason is that the existing contracts have well-defined boundaries. An NDA stops you from divulging a very specific set of information. A non-compete clause stops you from working in a very specific field. Your proposal has an undefined reach. What counts as research? What counts as "related"? It would seem that if I agree to such a contract, my entire life, both private and professional, after reading the paper is covered by the contract, and anything I do might come under scrutiny. There's never a point when I can go off-duty. "What's that? You read my paper on compression and were working on a side-project that uses compression? Gonna have to see some publication on it."
>Rather IIUC no one has gone out of the way to test the GPL largely because it is clearly within bounds
No, it's because the status quo is convenient and no one wants to be the first guinea pig. It's definitely not obvious that the terms are legally valid, but it's ambiguous enough that people don't want to test it.
2 replies →
Sounds dystopian.