Public: Legal system
Non-attribution open license   (+4)  [vote for, against]
Criminal contempt of court if you say where you got this from

Open licenses and copyrights are fairly well established now.

Copyright protection basically means it's all mine, mine, my precious, and you're not allowed to copy it at all without my explicit permission. Copyright law is extremely complicated and very detailed and there are a lot of lawyers making a lot of money by picking it over and over so that it is a pretty mature technology.

Open licenses ride on the back of that, but grant you specific permissions to reproduce, re-use or re-work my stuff, conditional on attributing my work to me, and sometimes (depending on the license) other obligations such as not making meelions or on issuing the same restrictions and permissions on your own derivative work. Open license organisations have their own lawyers who have drawn up pretty comprehensive and legally tight license texts, which piggy-back on the tottering edifice of copyright law and use it in a specifically targetted way, so as to grant general re-use permissions whilst enforcing attribution and credit.

Anyway to this idea. I propose a kind of anti-commons license. Not anti-commons in restricting re-use, but anti-commons in restricting attribution. In other words, you are free to re-use, re-work or re-distribute my stuff but on no account are you permitted to say that you have done this, you may not credit it to me, you may give no hint that I was the origin of anything you have produced. Even hints are not allowed in case anyone is able to use them in identifying me through "jigsaw identification"

This license would be drawn up by clever and expensive lawyers. It too would piggyback on existing mainstream law. Specifically the law of court injunctions, contempt of court, right to privacy, gagging orders, etc. etc. so as to make it a criminal offense to identify or to present material that could possibly aid identification of the source.
-- pocmloc, Mar 22 2021

What business model would cover the clever and expensive expense of hiring these clever and expensive lawyers?
-- pertinax, Mar 22 2021


I suppose you could try and get the creative commons people to do it. Maybe more likely if you didn't call it anti- commons.

The main issue is that anything licenced under it is unlikely to become popular - because noone will hear about it being used.
-- Loris, Mar 22 2021


At last, the virus creators and scam phone bank operators have a seat at the table of law...
-- RayfordSteele, Mar 22 2021


I can see the pharmaceutical companies who make lethal injection drugs using such a license to hide from public boycotting.
-- 21 Quest, Mar 22 2021


Monsanto approved...

...crap, I just stole [xen]'s line.
-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Mar 22 2021


It would be tricky to enforce, since any lawyers, court and jury engaging with a named client, to enforce such a non-attribution clause might be considered an act of attribution (albeit indirectly) which you've expressly forbidden through your identification through hints/jigsaw attribution prohibition.
-- zen_tom, Mar 22 2021


Perhaps the lawyers who handle the Rentishams account could be of assistance.
-- RayfordSteele, Mar 22 2021


A moral imperative doesn't trump a license?
-- wjt, Mar 23 2021


Not in contract bridge, I imagine.
-- pertinax, Mar 23 2021



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