My own license for the Noosphere

My own license for the Noosphere   philosophy

Given my unique beliefs about the "noosphere" — the world of human intellectual and creative expressions and ideas, separate from their material instantiation — and my absolute opposition to its territorialization, including intellectual property, including even using IP to enforce any "freedoms" beyond purely the destruction of IP by means of IP itself (the core idea of share-alike/copyleft), but also my belief that licenses function as a sort of legal performance art, a voluntary adoption of certain ethical and ideological principles and a request that those who benefit from the work of those who have voluntarily adopted such ideologies reciprocate in like kind in some way — this is the contract theory of licenses — mostly functioning as a manifesto and personal expression, not a tool to actually force people to act certain ways, I've often found cognitive dissonance in using any license other than the MPL, and even the MPL was not precisely what I wanted.

In light of this, I have finally written my own license, which can be found here. I've drafted it with the help of Gemini 2.5 Pro acting as rigorous devil's advocate, trying to point out things I've missed, confusions, or inconsistencies, as well as helping me draft legal prose using the MPL as a reference document, and for fetching quotes from the MPL based on subject matter and explaining them to help me navigate it. Nevertheless, every line in that document was extensively edited, enough to be essentially fully written by (through Ship of Theseus logic) me, and carefully read to make sure that it aligns perfectly and exactly with my vision and views. You are invited to use it if you desire. Here's the preamble, to get a taste:

THIS LICENSE IS AN ACT OF LIBERATION.* It is intended to permanently place a work into the public commons to enrich the noosphere—the sphere of human thought and collective intelligence. It is intended to end the tyranny of the false concept of "intellectual property," which introduces scarcity and territoriality into a sphere where none naturally exists nor need exist, and its enforcement by the violence of the long arm of the Law.

The core of this license is the idea that ONCE AN IDEA IS MADE PUBLIC, ONE MAY NOT CONTROL IT.

To defend this notion, we use the violence of the Law only to restrict the violence of the Law itself, and no more. All true freedom — freedom that does not come at the expense of the equal freedom of others — is preserved for those who wish to take it.

Key features include:

  1. Philosophical Foundation: This license is explicitly designed to free the noosphere — as a manifesto and act of legal performance art against the concept of intellectual property and copyright, where part of that performance art is just the act of using the license, and thus spreading the manifesto, whether or not the license is truly legally enforceable, but where the other part of that performance art is truly trying to make the license as legally clear as possible while aligning with its philosophy as a whetstone to clarify and sharpen the backing philosophy, and as a way to see how that philosophy plays out.
  2. File-Based (Weak) Copyleft: Like the MPL, what counts as a derivative work of an NPL work is defined by direct modifications to the existing files already licensed under the NPL, or files that encorporate a substantial amount of stuff copied from an NPL-licensed file. This extends to model weights trained on NPL files too, though, crucially.
  3. Expansive Share-Alike Trigger: Unlike most open-source licenses that trigger obligations upon distribution, the NPL's core conditions are triggered by Use. "Use" is defined very broadly to include private actions like running, compiling, reading, or training a machine learning model on the work. This is partly because I think that's what's important, and also because I think mandating distribution is actually not really something I want to do, but I still want the license to apply on most cases.

  4. Explicit Application to AI Models: The NPL is the only license I know of that explicitly, aggressively, and in-depth deals with the issue of machine learning and large language models without being unncessarily anti-AI in some kind of Luddite fervor, or being founded on misunderstandings of how AI works, but also without giving them a get out of jail free card:

    • It defines machine learning model weights trained on NPL-licensed material as a "Modification."
    • This means the model weights themselves must be licensed under the NPL.
    • It introduces "The Regurgitation Test" as a practical and specific evidentiary standard to determine if a model was trained on The Work, shifting the burden of proof to the model's creator and also making it clear when model training is valid and free of the NPL and when it isn't, instead of trying to attack all model training. This test is based on recent research into large language model memorization (1, 2) as well as recent court cases.
    • However, the regurgitation test also has a fallback clause that outlines what should happen should that court case fail, and my genuine sympathies to the AI side of the debate, just my ethical desires for them to cease their hypocrisy: those who benefit most from freely accessing vast amounts of information unencumbered by IP should not then be able to assert IP rights.

  5. Symmetrical Forfeiture of Remedy: The license imposes a radical symmetry on both the Creator and the User.

    • Creator's Covenant (Sec 1.2.2): The original creator gives up the right to sue anyone for the leaking or unauthorized distribution of their own private, unreleased versions of The Work.
    • User's Forfeiture (Sec 1.3.2): In exchange for the rights granted, anyone using NPL work also gives up the right to sue anyone for the leaking or unauthorized distribution of their private modifications. If your modified version gets out, it immediately becomes part of the public commons under the NPL.
  6. No Forced Distribution or Anti-Tivoization Clauses: It is only ethical, in my view, to use the tools of intellectual property to dismantle themselves. Not to enforce other agendas, even ones that are as ethical as the desire for all information to be freely shared or to prevent devices from being locked down. As such, in this respect, the NPL is far less restrictive than even the MPL, let alone the GPLv3
  7. Defense of the Data-Noosphere (SaaS Clause): While it doesn't have an AGPL-style "source-on-demand" clause, it tackles the SaaS issue from a data perspective. If you The Work is, or you build The Work out into through modifications, SaaS software or anything else that stores data about users or hosts public data, you are contractually forbidden from penalizing users for scraping or otherwise extracting that data (Sec 1.3.3).

  8. Dual-Structure: Legal Framework and Social Contract: The license is split into two distinct parts:

    • Section 1 (The Legal Framework): Contains the legally binding and enforceable terms.
    • Section 2 (The Social Contract): This is my attempt to recognize what a lot of other "ethical source" licenses do, about the needs and desires of communities and creators, without using the law in a way that I see as unethical. It's also a useful way to set the greater tone of the ideology behind the NPL. It outlines the Creator's non-binding "wishes," such as providing attribution and contributing changes back. While not legally enforceable, the license warns that violating this social contract will be met with social consequences, such as public documentation of the behavior and refusal of future engagement.
  9. Anti-Nationalist Jurisdiction: The license attempts to sidestep the laws of any single nation-state. It specifies that any legal dispute should be governed by the legal principles most favorable to the public domain, and grants jurisdiction to any forum chosen by the party who is defending the freedom of The Work (Sec 5). For someone as invested in rejecting those "those weary giants of flesh and steel", it would be ironic and hypocritical of me to then rely on any specific one, or allow any specific one to govern my license. So although this clause is probably (a) not remotely legal or enforcable and (b) even if it was, probably weakens the license, it seemed worth putting in.
  10. Limited Relicensing Option: You are permitted to relicense your modifications of NPL work under two specific "Secondary Licenses"—the Mozilla Public License 2.0 or Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0—as an alternative to the NPL (Sec 1.3.7). This is because I see those licenses as ethically similar enough that I'm comfortable allowing them as an outlet, and it makes the NPL much more practical and easy to work with for people that don't buy into its hardline ideological stance.

You'll note that despite how harsh, aggressive, and confrontational the NPL is for those who accept it and use works licensed under it (to enforce the wishes of those who accepted it), it's also pretty lenient regarding being able to avoid or escape being sucked into it.

Its weak file-based copyleft, for one thing, and it also has relicensing agreements to more lenient and less aggressive licenses. For instance, if someone makes something with an NPL-licensed tool, not by modifying the code but just by using code already written as a pure user — e.g an app using quake or an image using an NPL licensed photo editor — they can use whatever license they want for what they created. There's no EULA or TOS-style "we own your data now" clause like corporations do even though I'd only use it to further bolster the Noosphere.

Not only that, but if someone makes a project that includes anything licensed under the NPL, as long as they keep the files separate, they can license or not license that larger work, and the separate files they made, literally however they want, as long as the NPL stuff remains NPL: not only if they use an NPL library, but if they statically link to or even vendor an NPL library. Even creating an API to that NPL library for public or private use is fine! As long as the library and your modifications to those specific narrowly defined files remain NPL, they can do whatever the fuck they want otherwise. And all that's in addition to the fact that you can at any time convert your modifications of the NPL from NPL to MPL or CC BY SA.

So while the NPL is extremely harsh as long as things remain in its domain, it is way less harsh than the GPLV3 in a lot of ways, in my opinion, and a lot of internet leftist licenses, and it's also like way less viral and pretty easy to work with overall, in my opinion.

The reason I did this is hard to exactly pinpoint, but the best way I can put it is that it's because I'm designing the NPL to be more of a performance art and a political statement of belief, something one can voluntarily accept the mantle of, and that one is strongly protected by if one does, but which is also not something that is forced on others. I could force my ethical stance on others, even according to my ethics (since moral nihilism does not entail moral relativism) but I don't think that would surve my purposes.

If I made it overly viral, in combination with how novel and harsh it is, not only would no one use it except a tiny number of a particular kind of internet post-leftist even in the best case theoretical scenario, thus limiting its reach as a manifesto, but it would also render my own work, and any other work licensed with it, so totally irrelevant and useless to the broader noospheric ecosystem that it would render those works laughable and thus the license laughable by extension. I want to make it so that it's viable and easy to assign this license to a lot of things, at least in theory, because it's a really good political statement and manifesto and that won't happen if it's overly viral.

I also don't think that forcing people to behave as if they agree with an ethical position, when it's not strictly necessary for the physical defense of self and others, is a good way to woo or convince them. This sort of intended effect is I want to people to read it and feel slapped in the face by how aggressive and harsh it is, And to know that the people who have voluntarily accepted the NPL are taking a very strong and self-restrictive, principled stance. But once they read further, if they read carefully, to realize, "oh hey, I can work with this pretty easily." That would foster joy, surprise, and a willingness to give back and act in mutual reciprocity; and would enable giving back in mutual reciprocity in more ways, even if those ways are slightly imperfect, such as through things like the MPL and CC-BY-SA, thus making it easier for people to do the right thing even if it isn't the perfect thing. It's like a bit of a free gift and offer of lenience after a clear statement of absolute principles.