This repository contains licenses created by me that suit me. Others are welcome to use them. At this writing, there is just one. I forsee there being no more than three.
- Quick Links to License Text
- A̲cademic S̲imple S̲elf A̲rchived I̲nvestigation L̲icense
- Design License
- LICENSE
ASSAIL: https://github.com/ruminations/Licenses/blob/master/ASSAIL/ASSAIL.txt
DESIGN_LICENSE: temporarily, GPL3
The ASSAIL license is used for documents of independent authorship that historically might have been submitted to academic journals or book publishing houses for publication, but now may be self published on the web.
I have never published any academic papers. The reason is that the terms of licensing for nearly all academic journals require complete assignment of all copyright to the publisher. I have always found this offensive, and so have refused to participate. As an author, I have the right to freely share my work with anyone whom I choose. The idea of being coerced into a position of having to ask permission to share my own work is extremely repugnant. As a consequence, I have not shared my work at all.
A recent experience provides an exemplar of the dysfunction of academic publishing. I wanted to read a paper on octonians by H.S.M. Coxeter that had been published in the 1940's. I discovered it is now behind a paywall in Texas. I've met Coxeter, and if he were alive, I could simply write to him and ask for a copy, much as M.C. Escher once asked him for his writings on hyperbolic geometry.
Like all mathematicians, his motive for publishing had been to efficiently communicate his ideas to others who might be interested. It certainly was not to have the copyright transfered through a series of purely monetary transactions that would ultimately bury his work in the archives of predatory philistines.
In the modern world, a digital copy costs at most a few pennies to produce and transmit. There is no justification for extorting tens of dollars based solely on obsolete notions of copyright ownership.
The Creative Commons, which in my understanding was the brainchild of Aaron Swartz and his mentors, including Larry Lessig, was a good idea. In the past, I would often slap a Creative Commons license on something I did not really care about, just for expedience.
One objection is that it keeps changing: the current version is 4.0, I believe. Another is that Creative Commons tries to be useful to all people for all purposes. It is confusing for any ordinary person. People tend to ignore what they don't understand. My credo is "try to solve one small problem well."
I am not naive. There are legions of individuals who would unapologetically exploit open content for their own gain, which the Creative Commons 'by' clause, used alone, happily permits. I see no reason to accomodate exploitation. I see no reason to confuse the protection issue with a clutter of additional clauses. The key issues are free access and preventing content corruption.
Neither do I wish to be litigious, for the practice of law, in the final analysis, is always a colossal waste of time that benefits no one. The license should be written for the benefit of the author and the reader, not the lawyer or the mogul. It should be extremely simple, written in common language, and interpreted according to common sense. It should be short enough that the full text can be simply and unobtrusively appended to any document.
I was inspired to create the ASSAIL license in the fall of 2015, shortly after Larry Lessig announced his American presidential bid. I learned of that while reading one of his web log entries about the Aaron Swartz affair. I was peeved. I thought, how can this man seek to lead the nation that is still, arguably, the most powerful nation on earth, when he can't even solve the problem of academic publishing hypocrisy that contributed to the death of his friend Aaron?
It is not that tough. Setting up bittorent servers at every university to freely provide academic papers in a peer reviewed manner is easy, cheap, efficient, and would bypass the academic publishing racket completely. The latter, of course, is why it is not done. Too many have interests vested in the existing system, including, undoubtedly, Mr. Lessig.
Moreover, in the modern world, peer review is superfluous. Materials that are of value rise to the top of search engine hit lists. The common man supplies peer review with every clicked link. Certainly rubbish has its audience, but so do sublimely refined materials. It is easy to push away the chaff by adding or excluding a few words in a search.
So I sat down and wrote a draft of the ASSAIL license in about an hour. Over the ensuing week I periodically re-read the draft and made minor edits to refine the language for clarity. I completed the license well before Mr. Lessig's ill fated presidential bid ended about a month later. I do not forsee changing it again. Since then, I have periodically revisited it without changing an iota. I'm happy with it.
I decided I wanted to honor Aaron Swartz, whom I never knew, and whom I never heard of before seeing his obituary in global media in the spring of 2013. I wondered "of the millions of recent deaths world wide, why is this one so notable?" In consequence of his death, I read some of his writing, and perceived a fellow free spirit. So initially, the acronym was "Aaron Swartz Simple Academic Investigation License". I was aware that there are those who might not see that as the simple salute that it is. Some, perhaps those who were close to him, might object. More importantly, in the sweep of history, everyone's life, including Aaron's, is an ephemeral blip. The license name should express its substance, not some transitory politics prevalent in a bygone primitive human era.
For those reasons, I kept the acronym and changed the words. I will leave the references to him in this document, for here, it is simply an expression of the truth of my inspiration, which I unequivocally have a right to voice.
The svg files contain vector graphic expressions for the data in this png:
The svg file is the reference standard rendering. Text within the svg file and exif data in the png files indicate that this logo is ASSAIL licensed. The logo itself directly declares it is copyrighted material. You may use it wherever you like, subject to the terms of the ASSAIL license. Credit this web page as your source with a link. When used in the context of an ASSAIL licensed document, the link is already incorporated via the license itself.
The logo depicts a working two level planetary gear train with 5% backlash. There is a hidden four tooth sun gear beneath the visible sun gear, and that data is present in the svg file. The large backlash is in deference to tolerance requirements for print media and stereo lithography equipment. Fabricating the logo from the data is permissable, subject to the ASSAIL license.
The logo design itself was inspired by some interesting mathematical relationships described here:
essay: A Square Peg in a Round Hole
The cutout in the casing follows the "Triangular Peg" solution and coincides with the pitch circles of the gears. The data in the svg file was generated by some code I wrote about a decade ago that remains unpublished. The final design is a manual alteration that adjusts rendering. The copyright symbol and the letter 'c' inside it are my designs in order to avoid any infringement issues. The scaffolding for that design is in the file copyright_sign.svg, and that material is also ASSAIL licensed.
The logo is evocative of harmonious inter-operation and illuminating knowledge. You might call it the "Cooperative Creative Content Copyright" or "CC squared" for short. Copyright is all about freely and fairly sharing content. If your intentions are clouded by commerce, then you have mud in your gearbox and, like most of the gear icons on the web, your gear teeth jam because they are malformed, broken, or missing. The value of protection is in protecting the content from corruption together with protecting the author's right to express and the reader's right to engage.
It is doubtful that this little effort will ever become widely adopted. Nevertheless, my instinct is nagging at me to be prudent and lay groundwork. Therefore, I claim trademark to:
0: The ASSAIL logo
1: The phrase "ASSAIL license"
2: The phrase "Cooperative Creative Content Copyright"
3: The phrase "CC Squared"
4: The symbolic expressions "CCCC", "C^4", and "(CC)^2" in the context of licensing, including typographic variations.
To be thorough, I probably should deface the logo with the characters "TM" and append ™ to all the textual occurances. It should be apparent by now that my focus is creative expression, not the law. If it becomes an issue, I'll get to it, otherwise, it can wait.
For the moment, unless explicitly marked as public domain, my software is licensed with GPL 3.0 or any later version. See:
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html
for details. I will be replacing this license with one of my own authorship at some point, probably not soon, as legal matters are a low priority. The draft of the new license exists and it will also cover hardware and physical constructions. All of my code simply refers to this URL, so the switch will be immediate once this page is updated.
The GPL license, like the Creative Commons license, has become overly complicated and hard to understand. The key issue the GPL addresses that more permissive licenses like MIT or BSD do not is the 'share alike' provision. The GPL has become too complicated because some have abused the privilege of access and created oblique methods to effectively nullify either 'share-alike' or 'free access'.
The 'share-alike' provision is important. If your innovation benefits from community innovations, you should be willing to contribute your innovation back to that community. This is really just obvious civility. After all, your innovation would not have been possible without the community foundation. In the long run, selfishness always fails, so I don't worry too much about it. Nevertheless, if a precaution is easy to implement, I will. I have no interest in working for commercial interests for free, indeed I have no interest in working for commercial interests under any circumstances. In the future, people will just do what they are good at, and their reward will be that other people will benefit.
Since I do not much care for the GPL's complexity, my code contains only a simple one line reference to this URL. For me, the most offensive part of the GPL is the clutter of repetitive and really pointless text in all of the files. That text is not required, to my understanding, and so I omit it. If you don't already know about the GPL, a visit to their website will answer your questions. Most people already have a good practical idea about what it means.
Licenses and logos of my original authorship that are distributed here are licensed under the ASSAIL license the text of which is here:
https://github.com/ruminations/Licenses/blob/master/ASSAIL/ASSAIL.txt