⚠ NOTE: This is not legal advice and is not written by attorneys.
⚠ NOTE: As of 2022, this license has not been reviewed for legal merit.
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A permissive yet (attempt at a) "Tradeleft" and "Patentleft" CC0-like license.
CC0 leaves trademarks open and even promotes them as a worthy idea. It stands back from patents in fear. Both of these indicate apologia to current intellectual property systems, and a lack of embracing much-needed systemic change.
Check the diff between CC0 and MD0 versions - this is perhaps your greatest tool to see the difference. Here is from CC0-1.0 compared to MD0-0.7.
Importantly, notice that the "fallback license" is barely modified from CC0. This should put you at ease.
It certainly is "permissive" in providing the creator with the ability to trademark and patent the creation. This shows even in the legal text, which sounds like it might promote the wrong intent of a licensor who wishes to waive those rights, too.
Please look at the legal text of the latest version, but let me highlight one of the largest additions to MD0 as of this writing, the additional rights explicitly identified for waiving include:
- design rights and other sui generis rights;
- trade secrets or other proprietary rights in
- technical, scientific, manufacturing, regulatory and other information,
- inventions (whether or not patentable), discoveries, designs, results, techniques, database rights, data, databases, data collections and other know-how,
- including plans, processes, practices, methods, trade secrets, instructions, formulae, formulations, recipes, compositions, specifications, protocols, analytical and quality control information and procedures, test data and results, reports, studies, and marketing, pricing, distribution, cost and sales information;
- intellectual property rights in Software;
- applications and registrations and renewals for, and all associated rights with respect to, any of the foregoing in any jurisdiction, including all rights to collect royalties, products and proceeds with respect to any of the foregoing;
- rights protecting the extraction, dissemination, use and reuse of data in a Work; and
- other similar, equivalent or corresponding rights throughout the world and beyond based on applicable law or treaty, and any national implementations thereof.
a. No trademark or patent rights held by Affirmer are waived, abandoned, surrendered, licensed or otherwise affected by this document.
CC0 FAQ on Trademark Rights 1/2:
One aspect you retain control over, however, is the use of the work by others with your trademarks. CC0 does not surrender any trademark rights you have. If others want to associate your trademark with a work you distribute under CC0, they need to ask your permission first as required by trademark law.
CC0 FAQ on Trademark Rights 2/2:
CC0 very clearly states that trademark and patent rights of the affirmer are not affected – CC0’s sole reach is copyright and related and neighboring rights, including database rights. Trademarks rights are not affected because creators who use CC0 should be able to protect the quality of products that are associated with their trademark (for example, by preventing a subsequent user of the work from leading others to believe the work in its subsequent use and/or form is associated with or endorsed by the affirmer). So if your primary concern is to ensure the quality and integrity of products associated with your name or your project, then trademark, combined with CC0, may be an option for you.
Patents are fundamentally more challenging. One of our goals at Creative Commons is to encourage use and dissemination of information in a way that encourages others to build upon it, sometimes in surprising and unexpected ways. We can accomplish that objective through a copyright-only solution, without introducing the complexities associated with patent rights. We also wanted to keep CC0 as simple as possible, consistent with its original design goals. We concluded that any perceived benefits of including a patent waiver were significantly outweighed by the downsides of its inclusion.
Legal text(md0-0.7):
a. Owners and Affirmer will not register or attempt to register the Work as a trademark, patent, or similar intellectual property which may put the Work at risk of infringement, and hereby preemptively deny permission of any present or future registrations of the Work. Further, owners and Affirmer declare the Work as prior art.
Mossdew Club is an unknown entity(currently a video game Guild) with unknown authority and structure.
They have firmly stated their intent to embracing the most extremely-permissive licensing as possible, but did not want Trademark nor Patents to hijack what they nor their community created; this license was originally made for their cause. However, they are not relevant to the license itself, beyond their intent to use it for their works.
Mossdew and Mossdew Club is just a name, which itself is MD0 licensed (as is all of their output by all Mossdew members[cybernauts] by default).
This repository is for the MD0 license, for which the license's text itself is licensed as MD0 as well.
Seeking outside opinions and interest in the license.
The MD0-0.6 license and request for opinions was sent to a few people:
- The creator of "Leftcopy.org" and "SocialDomain.net".
- They are not quite convinced on the necessity of MD0, but I suggest looking into their project Living Patterns.
- Emailed to GNU and FSF.
- No response as of 2022-08-27. Emails sent 2022-08-23.
- Thank you, founder of Mossdew and the Mossdew Cybercivilzation/Club itself, for inspiring this license to exist in the first place.
- Thank you Creative Commons for making the CC0 license and others.
- Thanks to the creator of the Leftcopy license, SocialDomain.net, and LivingPatterns.me for responding with feedback, and for manifesting and collecting licenses which may be better suited.
- Thanks to the administrator of OpenGameArt.com for giving me some things to think about and tolerating my ramblings on what MD0 tries to accomplish.
- Thanks to many other people of the internet who also provided feedback and tolerated my ramblings.