Interesting post. My view is ethical licences are trying to do too much in hanging on copyright law. The advantage of FOSS is that it's just setting down rules around the hinges of copyright (conveying copies of the work, etc). This seems a lot hazier and more complicated. If a party finds themselves with a copy of a work they legally accessed, can they be compelled to adopt certain behaviour in order to be allowed to run it? I don't know, but I'm dubious. What about an entity that is in compliance at time t0 but not time t1...

I think stuff like the copyrfarleft can be desirable, just not sure if licences are the right tool. Of the ones I've seen I think the peer production licence is the one that seems most plausibly binding: civicwise.org/peer-production-…

This seems a lot hazier and more complicated. If a party finds themselves with a copy of a work they legally accessed, can they be compelled to adopt certain behaviour in order to be allowed to run it?

Hmm... I'm not sure I agree, aside from complexities of interpretation.

My sense would be that this is not too different from many licences, which dictate who can do what with the software, in what situations.

I guess the fun may really start in discussing a distinction between:

• anyone is licensed to use the code, provided that they comply with x, y, and z; and
• we only grant a licence to those who meet the following criteria: x, y, and z.

(But then I'm paraphrasing language anyway, so it is likely counterproductive!)

A licence seems to me to be unilateral in principle.

This feels odd to me.

I can grant my neighbour a licence to come into my garden to trim their hedge, but I don't see as meaning that they can come into it for another reason, or that it would apply to anyone else?