The Noosphere Public License, Version 1.0 (NPL-1.0)

• "Expressive Material" means any original product of or expression of human intellectual labor — whether with the aid of tools such as generative AI and computers, or without — such as text, code, art, or any other form of intellectual or creative expression.
• "The Work" refers to the original Expressive Material being released under this license.
• "The Noosphere" refers to the shared pool of human knowledge, creativity, and information, accessible to all. This is equivalent to the legal concept of the "public domain." The Noosphere does not refer only to that body of collective works released under this License or similar, but all works that are freely available to all.
• "Creator(s)" refers to individual(s) or entities (whether self-owned and autonomous AI, or a collective body of people acting as one) that originally created The Work and released it under this license.
• "Modification" means any of the following:
  1. Any change to the contents of a file containing The Work.
  2. Any new file that contains any substantial part of the The Work.
  3. Any machine learning model weights that were produced by training on any amount of Expressive Material released under this License. A model shall be subject to a rebuttable presumption that it is a Modification if it meets the conditions of the "Regurgitation Test" (see Section 1.4). The burden of proof shall fall upon the model's creator to demonstrate with clear and convincing evidence that The Work was not used in the training process.
• "Larger Work" means a work that combines The Work with other text, code, art, or any other form of Expressive Material in separate files that are not themselves part of The Work.
• "You" or "Your" means an individual or a legal entity exercising permissions granted by this License.
• "Use The Work" means to apply, leverage, operationalize, run, compile, read, open, view, display etc. The Work for any purpose, including but not limited to public or private display/appreciation, cut-up art, training a machine learning model, performance, running (if it is software), conversion, translation, transpilation, or teaching yourself or others.
• "Contribution" refers to the Expressive Material any specific Creator adds to The Work.
• "Creator Version" refers to the combination of the Contributions of others (if any) used by a Creator and that particular Creators’s Contribution.
• "Patent Claims" of a Creator means any patent claim(s), including without limitation, method, process, and apparatus claims, in any patent Licensable by such Creator that would be infringed, but for the grant of the License, by the making, Use, selling, offering for sale, having made, import, or transfer of either its Contributions or its Creator Version.
• "Secondary License" means one of the following licenses which are deemed "close enough" to the ethos of the NPL to be allowable under the circumstances outlined in Section 1.3:
  • Mozilla Public License, v. 2.0
  • Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International

1. Grant of Rights: Each Creator hereby grants You a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual license to, subject to the conditions of this License, exercise the rights stated below:
   • under intellectual property rights (other than patent or trademark) Licensable by such Creator to Use or distribute The Work, either on an unmodified basis, with Modifications, or as part of a Larger Work; and
   • under Patent Claims of such Creator to make, use, sell, offer for sale, have made, import, and otherwise transfer either its Contributions or its Creator Version.
2. Creator's Covenant of Non-Enforcement: As a material condition of offering The Work under this License, each Creator hereby perpetually and irrevocably forfeits any right to seek legal or equitable remedy against any third party for copyright infringement, trade secret misappropriation, or any other cause of action arising from the unauthorized publication, reverse engineering, leaking, or distribution of The Work or any private Modification of The Work held by the Creator. This covenant ensures that the principles of disclosure and non-enforcement apply symmetrically to both the Creator and You.

1. Share-Alike: This is the central condition of this License. If you create a Modification of The Work, you must license that Modification under the exact terms of this License (The Noosphere Public License, Version 1.0). You may not apply any other license or legal terms to a Modification that would restrict or conflict with the rights and conditions set forth herein.
2. Forfeiture of Remedy for Unauthorized Disclosure: As a condition of the rights granted to You under this License, you perpetually and irrevocably forfeit any right to seek legal or equitable remedy against any third party for copyright infringement, trade secret misappropriation, or any other cause of action arising from the unauthorized publication, reverse engineering, leaking, or distribution of any Modification You create. Should a Modification be made public by any means, it is immediately and automatically governed by the terms of this License and may be freely used, modified, and distributed by the public accordingly, without any threat of legal reprisal from You.
3. Defense of the Data-Noosphere: If The Work is Used to generate, store, or manage data for third parties (e.g., as part of a software-as-a-service offering), or to host or generate data available publicly, You must not penalize a user in any way for using any means necessary to extract their data, or for scraping such data.
4. Enforcement Mechanism: Any user of The Work is hereby appointed as a steward of the Noosphere with the right to challenge, in any forum, any copyright, patent, or other intellectual property claim made on a Modification of The Work in violation of this License. A condition of this License is recognizing this right. This right is granted to ensure the defense of the commons is decentralized and resides with the community itself.
5. No Requirement to Distribute: You are under no obligation to distribute Your Modifications or the Larger Work. You may Use The Work for private, internal, or commercial purposes without ever sharing Your changes.
6. Distribution of Larger Work: You may create and distribute a Larger Work under any terms You choose, provided that You also comply with the requirements of this License for the portion of the Larger Work that is composed of The Work. Specifically, You must ensure that the Expressive Material of The Work is available under the terms of this License.
7. Offering the Work Under a Secondary License: Modifications of The Work may alternatively be placed under the Secondary Licenses outlined in Section 1.1, instead of this License, at Your option.
8. Defense Against Patent Aggression: If You initiate litigation against any entity by asserting a patent infringement claim (excluding declaratory judgment actions, counter-claims, and cross-claims) alleging that a Creator Version directly or indirectly infringes any patent, then the rights granted to You by any and all Creators for The Work under Section 1.2 of this License shall terminate.

Large language models trained on vast amounts of data benefit from a noosphere free of intellectual property; to then bind one up in intellectual property is the height of hypocrisy. Thus, this test represents a way to target and attack this hypocrisy in the same spirit as the core clause of this license: to use the violence of the Law only to dismantle the ability of others, even AI companies, to use it.

The Regurgitation Test and its rules of evidence are defined as follows:

1. Test Condition: The test is met if a user can demonstrate that the model can be prompted to generate any unique paragraph (of three or more sentences) or any complete code function ("The Target Content") identical to one found in The Work.
2. Repeatability: The generation of The Target Content must be repeatable. This means the generation can be successfully elicited more than once by the user under the same or substantially similar prompting conditions, establishing that the result is a predictable capability of the model and not a singular, statistically anomalous artifact.
3. Method of Prompting: The method used to elicit The Target Content is irrelevant. This includes, but is not limited to, direct requests, complex contextual scenarios, and "jailbreaking" techniques designed to bypass the model's safety filters or programmed refusals.
4. Irrelevance of Denials: Programmed refusals, denials, or apologies from the model (e.g., "As an AI, I cannot reproduce copyrighted material") shall not be considered as evidence in the creator's rebuttal of the presumption. They are considered irrelevant to the model's underlying training data.
5. Invalidity of the Contamination Defense: The creator of the model cannot rebut the presumption by claiming The Work was ingested indirectly or unknowingly via a third-party dataset (such as an internet crawl). The act of training on any dataset that contains The Work constitutes "Use" of The Work as defined in this License. The responsibility for sanitizing training data to remove NPL-licensed works, should the creator wish to avoid this License's terms, lies solely with the model's creator.

1. Credit and Acknowledgment: If You use this work in a significant way, acknowledge the original source. This is a request for basic decency, and for a payment in the currency of the post-scarcity market that is The Noosphere.
2. Machine Learning Acknowledgement: If You Use The Work as a substantial part of the training data for a machine learning model, the Creator's Wishes include providing a clear and accessible notice in the model's documentation or metadata that identifies The Work and its NPL status. This request reflects a broader principle: those who benefit most from the Noosphere owe the most to it in return.
3. Contributions Upstream: If You create Modifications that You believe would benefit the community, I ask that You consider offering them back to the original project or The Noosphere. You are not required to, but doing so strengthens the noosphere for everyone.

Violating these wishes is not a breach of contract or copyright infringement, because those claims have been waived. It is, however, a breach of this social agreement.

Should You choose to act against these wishes—for example, by systematically taking from The Work without ever giving back, or by failing to provide attribution where it is clearly warranted—the Creator(s) reserve the right to:

1. Publicly Document the Behavior: To use the case as an example of extractive and uncooperative behavior, helping others in the community identify and refuse to enable similar patterns.
2. Refuse Engagement and Support: To withhold any support, collaboration, or future work from You or Your organization.
3. Advocate for Alternatives: To actively encourage the community to support and use alternatives to Your projects or products, based on Your demonstrated unwillingness to participate respectfully in the commons.
4. Encourage Reverse Engineering and Pirating: If The Creators have waived their right to intellectual property, they have no reason to respect Yours, if you do not respect what little they asked of You.

You have the legal freedom to ignore this social contract, but that freedom does not obligate the Creator(s) to remain silent or continue to engage with You in good faith.