 So I'm going to talk about the way that we talk about free software legal tools. Oh, apparently I don't have that either. OK. So as many of you are probably aware, free software open source has one, which is great, which means we have lots of folks using the software. But we haven't quite gotten as much buy-in on the tools. And so we see either like a complete blank slate or kind of using the tools in not the best way or not the way that we intended them to be used. This is, have people seen The Little Mermaid? Yeah. OK. So I read this story on Atlas Obscura about this woman who she looked at The Little Mermaid, and what she thought was, I have to get my friend, who's a nautical history expert, to watch this movie with me so I can see how much of what's going on in The Little Mermaid is accurate from the shipwreck scene. The spoiler is not very much. And so I fear that we are in a similar situation with free software legal tools. Like, we haven't had a Disney movie about them yet. I keep my fingers crossed. But this is sort of the level of understanding that we have sometimes with these tools, which is really unfortunate. So we spent a lot of time making them. So my name is Deb Nicholson. I work at the Open Invention Network. I often get the opportunity to talk to people about these things for the first time. They're like, oh, I figured we'd just leave all the legal stuff till next year. And I'm like, wow, that is a stunningly bad idea. Don't do that. And so I get to hear a lot of the result of what happens when we don't do a great job of messaging around the free software legal tools. If you want, you can tweet at me or you can email me. I'll do that again at the end. So I see this as sort of a two-part challenge. First, the way that we think about copyrights and patents is actually different. It really is different. When you go out into the rest of the world, property rights are pretty old. So a lot of our stuff around, especially copyright, but also patents, is based on legal code from property rights. In the US, you can shoot someone like for trespassing on your property. So think of all that as being baked into like, what are you doing with my things? And that's baked into our legal code in the Western parts of the world where we, you know, well, I know you guys don't shoot people over here, but not usually. That's kind of our jam, I guess. So copyright is old enough. We started using copyright as an international thing in 1886 when the Berne Convention was established. And that means there's a lot of case law in there that really holds this idea that written words should be considered of a piece with cattle and land and pitchforks and all those kinds of things. So we're really going upstream when we're like, cool, borrow my cows, whatever. So that's one of our challenges in messaging the way that we talk about our tools. Another thing that kind of goes with that is that lawyers tend not to be early adopters, present company expected. But usually, if it's like, oh, I didn't learn about that at all in law school, cool, I'll try it out on my first legal job and see if I get fired. That's not usually an MMO for a successful lawyer. And finally, do you guys know what this is from? The Checkers Guide to the Galaxy. It's a note about we're going to destroy your house that's being kept in the basement of a municipal building that's open on the third Thursday of every month. So a lot of our documentation tends to be like this. We haven't done a great job of telling lawyers that are not already here in this room where to look for best practices and things like that. Once you're already in, you get invited to the secret cabal and all that kind of stuff. And that's great. But before you're in, you don't know where to look. So the second part of our challenge is that if we leave a vacuum for how we want free software legal tools to be perceived, other parties will do our job for us. And they will do it poorly, like really poorly. Stunningly poorly. Boring occasionally and maliciously. So we'll look at a couple of those entities that have sort of stepped up, so to speak. So oh, you can't read this one very well. The Compliance Industrial Complex, we talked about this last week or two weeks ago in Australia. And talked about it before. Their mantra is be afraid. Be very, very afraid of copy left and all of that free software that you're getting out on street corners and whatever. The reason is that they want you to pay them to make all the scary stuff go away. This is not so different than if you look at those advertisements in the 50s for stuff to make all the different parts of your body smell good. And they were really like fear-based. They were like, oh, why doesn't no one like you at work? It's because you're not using this kind of stuff. And so it's a very old way of getting people to buy your product. So you see this also sometimes, this kind of attitude from people who are vying for an inside counsel job. So they want to say, oh, there's this huge danger over here, but luckily I am an expert in the domain and I can fix it for you. So this makes them sort of against our message, which is that we're producing a bunch of scary gotcha sort of software. Another thing, trial lawyers. I read a couple of these trial lawyer blogs, because they're not familiar. This is the Rococo art period, which is like, you can see there's ruffles on the ruffles and flowers on the flowers. It's a very like, there is no such thing as too much. And that is kind of the trial lawyer mantra in these days. When we're discussing the scope of patentability, how long should copyright be good for? And the answer is there is no such thing as too much. The earth could be a cinder after the sun has gone away, and we should have copyright go on for another 70 years. I don't know who that's for, but that would be their position. So the maximalist scope ends up producing some pretty ridiculous kinds of results, which we'll talk about in a minute. And then finally venture capitalists. This is Ursula from The Little Mermaid. She talked to Ariel and made it seem like, oh, I care for you. I want you to realize your dreams. That's actually not what happened in case you didn't see The Little Mermaid. She was very much in her own self-interest. And venture capitalists are doing the same thing. They convince young startups, you should get lots and lots and lots of patents, not because it's going to be so great for you to spend all that money on patents or whatever, but when your dream is dead, I can at least sell off the patents. And so this is another place where people are getting patents are super, super important. They're like, what they should be hearing there is I mostly expect your thing to fail, and I hope to sell off the furniture and the patents. So this is not a good place for people to be getting information about how legal tools work and how they interact with software. Oh, random people in the, I get two of the fish. Sorry about that. Ooh, slavery office. So this is an, I'm not sure why, but people listen to random folks on the internet. I used to underestimate this group until the last election, but not anymore. And apparently they have opinions also about copy lab, free software legal tools, what the scope of patentability should be. If you want to, if you want to lower your IQ any day, go looking for people talking about legal tools on slash dot, lots of, lots of stuff there. I used to, when I used to work at the FSF, like people would call me up and try and get me to give them legal advice over the phone. People, it's kind of, it's weird. It's like a, they think like legal advice is some street drug. If you could just trick people into giving it to you, you don't have to pay as much for it. It's not like that. And then finally, there are other kinds of opportunities. There are companies that think they see an angle here. They're like, they come to our community and they're like, oh, look at all these little kids making software with their hippie-dippy licenses. And they think they're just gonna like roll up and take it and go away and there won't be any consequences. So this, you know, obviously there are still rules. So now that we're convinced that we need to craft our own message and not let random people on the internet and other bad actors do it for us, how do we do that? So it's kind of two parts. One, we need to be able to convey the facts properly. And then two, we also need to be able to convey what is good behavior and what is bad behavior. Here is where we are right now. This is a church in a man-made lake. They definitely removed the bells, but the townspeople will all tell you that they hear them on spooky nights and things like that. And there's a lot going on below the surface. So a lot of people who come to our shores here in Free Software have seen this. They have no idea what's going on below the surface. It's up to us to fill that in. And for many folks, Mohawks and Free Software are brand new, but they're not new to everyone. So I feel like this critical piece of context is something that we can provide. Just because you've only just read about the GPL doesn't mean that it is brand new. Obviously everyone in this room knows that, but there are definitely more traditional companies that are actually kind of new to software and are new to our things. And so when they come here, they're like, oh, I heard about this new license. And it's like, yeah, the GPL is not actually new. Free Software is 30 years old or so. I think it behooves us to provide that context that one, it's been around for a really long time. And then two, it's probably not going anywhere. And so that I think will give it a different gravity than like, tell me about this new fangled Free Software thing. And so I think it behooves us to provide that context. And then, do you guys know what printer this is? Okay, one. It is, it is. So the second thing I think about crafting our message is that we want to tell stories. This is the printer that RMS writes about in Free Software, Free Society. In case you were wondering what it looked like, it's big, right? You could probably fit like a family of four in there. But I'm climbing on printers like that anymore. But he made a, you know, he told a story about a printer that captured people's imagination. So when I tell you that we can craft a story that makes Free Software interesting, I think we can do it, right? Printers are not inherently interesting, right? I mean, maybe if you work at HP, I don't know. But so one thing that I would say is that part of that story has to be that, so we've got copyright, but a lot of different entities have added to and embroidered upon the idea of copyright with different kinds of legal tools. And I think it's interesting to think about what the motive for those different types of additions to copyright are. So like the DMCA, the goal here is actually not to like help the world or give stuff away or be a nice person. It's kind of to force people to give you money for stuff that they didn't used to have to give you money for. I could do a whole talk on how I feel like we're hurling towards this situation or people are obligated to buy stuff. But that is actually a whole other talk. So this is an attempt to update copyright, but I don't think that it's for a good reason. It's for commercial interest to the consumer's detriment. If we could balance that, it would be okay. I'm not opposed to people making money like, I like a big platter of sushi as much as the next person who likes a big platter of sushi, I guess, but this, you see, where commercial interests are being balanced against free speech. And so this is another place where we've tried to like, how do we update copyright? This is, Central is from the Blender Foundation. It's like a completely free software open source. Like everything is licensed, Creative Commons. And it twigs something for Sony Pictures and they send automatic takedown notice, whoops. But I think this is really telling about like, overreach and how that overreach can be really ridiculous. So we can talk about the ways that we interact with copyright that feel wrong, ways that feel ridiculous, and talk about like, what we might do instead. Corey Doctor likes to talk about copy left as the software licensing equivalent of not buying cookies at the store. So that later when you're really hungry and you wanna eat all the cookies, you've already behooved yourself to the community and said, we're all gonna act in the community's interest as opposed to sell it off at the exclusion of the rest of the group, if that makes sense. Maybe you don't crave cookies in the middle of the night, but. So patents, again, we can make it look ridiculous. Apple has a design patent on rounded corners. This is a tablet, an actual tablet as well from the Assyrian Empire. So like the idea that they would try and have a patent on that is ridiculous and they should be mocked. This is fog, which I couldn't figure out how to picture some of the really vaguely written patents but I think it's important to talk about how ridiculous they are and mock things like the file allocation table patent or there's a patent on the, did you mean to attach a file to email when you have forgotten and it has the word attachment in it? I don't know if that was granted but it was definitely applied for. And then, so silly, ridiculous. And then this one is actually just evil. This is not a patent, this is a copier, but there was a company troll that sued a non-profit in Vermont for image processing patents and they wanted money from everyone who used their copier. They're a non-profit that serves like unemployed people who wanna make copies of their resume. They would have sunk them to pay $1,000 a pop. So when we talk about like why we are really passionate about these legal tools, it's because we wanna stop evil, we wanna get rid of the silliness, we wanna get rid of the ridiculous and frivolous patents. So sharing in a patent world, we've written patent clauses. Like I said, I work at the Open Invention Network, the DPL lot, these are all to enable sharing and I think that's the story that we wanna tell. So again, organizing people where they're at, you wanna understand that not everybody knows everything. Only not even Bradley Kuhn left the womb knowing about copy left, right? So you have to ask questions to figure out where people are at. They might be concerned about security, many eyes make shallow bugs, it's a great argument. Maybe promoting their company. Being a good actor in our space and not coming late to the party and screwing it up is a great way to put your company out there. And then efficiency, having clear assignation policy so people know how to give you their code is gonna be good. So sharing our code, I think it's also important for us to talk about when you have crossed the line, what is not okay? Free software is more like bowling than nom. If you think you're a disruptor, because you've come here with a clever hack to steal code or whatever, you're not. And we need to say that. That needs to be part of our message, I think. You don't have to use these words, you can use your own voice. I understand not everyone wants to call someone a jerk. Last year's don't make friends and people remember. So if your company is like, cool, I found all these kids making software with this hippie license, and then you sue everyone for short-term gains, guess what? They're not gonna wanna come work at your company. If you want more on how to not show up as a disruptor jerk, Vicky Bressur has a great talk on this. So in conclusion, our messaging is here. In the murky, watery depths right now, and I wanna see us come into the light and have people see us working, have them see what we're doing, have us explain why we're doing it, get them to come along with us, take them fishing, maybe? I don't know. One solid piece that you could come and help us as far as creating better documentation is to work on the Beyond Licensing Working Group at the Open Source Initiative. I have picture credits, of course, and then I would be happy to take whatever questions we have time for. Thank you. Are there any questions? End of the day. It's totally fine if we don't have questions. Or people can send me, I know sometimes with legal topics, like, you know, I'd be like, my friend's company, blah, blah, like, it's fine. You can contact me directly as well. Oh, I feel like I have to come up with a question. Okay. Um, how would you compare the different patent groups like OAN and LOT and DPL? I don't know much about DPL. Maybe, could you say a word about those? Yeah, so the Open Invention Network is a defensive patent pool. Everyone signs an agreement not to sue each other within the pool. And it's focused on Linux, GNU, Android, and that kind of stuff. The license on transfer network is intended to make it unappealing to sell patents to a troll, which is defined by a company that gets more, 50% or more of their revenue from patent aggression. And so that's an additional contract that follows that patent around. And then the DPL is a defensive patent license, which didn't have a lot of uptake, but there's still tinkering with it. It's intended to kind of mirror the DPL, but be for licensing patents. So. So that was quite entertaining, but the point was that you were suggesting that we don't make that message very well, but surely that's what you said is exactly what any of us would say, and is that not already the message people give? I mean, maybe it's not received anywhere because some people have just turned up, but I don't see a lot of people not giving those sensible messages. I think it's more that it needs to be intentional. I think that when we're called upon to do it, we probably do a good job, but that maybe we're like, oh, just use this software, and then if we could take another minute, I'm saying we should be more proactive. Yeah, so that's kind of what I would like to see us do. Right, or you could join me on Beyond Licensing Work Group so that we could document some of this stuff, and then instead of doing it over and over again, you could just point people to this amazing resource, which we have to still build. What will Beyond Licensing become as a resource? What's the goal? Well, so far, it's a wiki of ideas around best practices for using free and open-source software and using the free and open-source software legal tools. So, yeah, all right, well, cool. One more talk from our friend Simon Phipps, so. All right, thank you very much, Deb.