DIP-80 Intellectual Property

CONTRACTING WITH DOPE DAO AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

This issue has initially arisen due to the fact that there has been some contributors for whom signing the DOPE DAO Intellectual Property and Contractor Agreement would be detrimental to them. Recent events have also highlighted the importance of addressing the nature of our ‘Open Source’ based ecosystem.

The purpose of the DAO describes the development of a public good enterprise that empowers persons of creative talent and drive to build upon Web3 ideals of open source composability and decentralised community driven purpose.

The DOPE DAO Operating Agreement currently specifies:

ARTICLE VII (OLD) CONTRACTING TO DOPE DAO

When any entity wishes to contract to the DAO in order to provide services required by the DAO the contractor must proceed through the Official Proposal Process as described in Article VI. The Contractor must sign the DOPE DAO Intellectual Property and Contractor Agreement, available by link on the Website DOPEWARS.GG. The Contractor will retain the right to protect their privacy.

I propose that we amend this Article to read as such:

ARTICLE VII (NEW)

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

Unless otherwise specified by proposal though the Official Proposal Process, all DOPE DAO and DopeWars code shall be presumed to be permissively licensed under the MIT software license. All DOPE DAO and DopeWars art or media assets shall be licensed as Creative Commons Zero.

ARTICLE IX.2 SUBSEQUENT CONTRIBUTIONS.

This will be nixed, now irrelevant.

The value of being permissive: With regard to code, the DAO Lawyer agrees that permissive licensing is better as opposed to the more restrictive CopyLeft type licensing. These more restrictive Open Source licenses require that any iteration of the said code is also licensed as such. So although this seems very open it is actually quite closed because it closes down many avenues of expansion that might be otherwise available. The value of being permissive is that the building, the expression, can grown unencumbered by any restraining factors.

MIT:

A permissive software license. Users of software using a MIT Licence are permitted to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense and sell copies of the software. This is the most permissive of the licenses, a simple acknowledgement. It is important that we encourage the use of a single license, interoperability is challenged when multiple licenses are used.

With regard to Art/Media assets the Creative Commons Licenses are utilized. The benefits of being permissive are the same as with code. Builders, contributors, collaborators, artists are free to enhance the DOPEWARS ‘meme’ without fear of copyright infringement.

Creative Commons Zero:

Creative Commons Zero CC0, waives copyright, but does not necessarily waive moral rights or publicity rights. Moral Rights are a set of rights that belong to creators, including the right to be attributed as creator, the right to protect the integrity of the work, and the right to prevent work from being used in a way that could harm the creators reputation. Publicity rights are rights that protect the creators commercial use of their name, image and likeness.

Overall the intent to to encourage/enable unconstrained growth of the DopeWars ecosystem as an idea. Similar in the way to many other projects that have successfully attracted huge popularity like (Nouns/Goblintown).

Of course we cannot go so far as dictating that all DWs MODs/branches/projects MUST be permissively licensed. At the end of the day the governance process (being on chain) is immutable and sovereign. The game goes where the DOPE flows. But it is beneficial to encourage code to be Permissively licensed (under a single standard) and to establish our current art/media assets as CC0 to set a benchmark and encourage it further.

Tani