When you click ‘Yes’ to Being Recorded
A New and very Old Paradigm for Knowledge Sharing
Imagine you’re about to join a Zoom call, and as you’re about to click “Yes” to being recorded, a new prompt appears:
“Dear Participant, by joining this conversation and consenting to the recording, you agree that all shared thoughts, insights, and content fall under the Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license. This means you’re free to use, adapt, and distribute the content, provided you give appropriate credit, link to the license, and distribute your contributions under the same terms. Our aim is to foster openness, collaboration, and shared learning.”
How would that make you feel? Would you feel more comfortable clicking “Yes” or would this make you reconsider your participation?
The purpose of this scenario isn’t to scare you off but to provoke thought about our approach to shared knowledge in the digital era. It’s a reflection of a movement championed by the likes of Richard Stallman, an American free software movement activist and programmer who founded the Free Software Foundation (FSF).
Stallman and the FSF stand for a world where software freedom is paramount. The right to run, study, share, and modify software are considered fundamental. This principle, known as ‘copyleft’, is designed to ensure that all derivative works of GPL-licensed software also remain free. Stallman’s aim was to prevent software from becoming proprietary and promote a more collaborative and open software community.
In a world increasingly dominated by proprietary software and corporate domination, how do we safeguard our digital commons? How do we protect against the proprietary capture of our collective knowledge and ensure our digital interactions foster collaboration rather than restriction?
It’s important here to understand the nuances of open source licenses. Some licenses, like Apache 2.0 used by Google, while promoting openness, don’t protect against later proprietization. They allow derived works to be made proprietary, thus enabling a semblance of Richard Stallman’s open source, but potentially leading to locked-down, proprietary offshoots. This pseudo-openness can undermine the fundamental tenets of the open source movement.
On the contrary, licenses like Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) and the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 (AGPLv3) (or more generally gpl), maintain ‘copyleft’ principles, ensuring derivative works remain open and free. This is the heart of Stallman’s vision — a digital commons that is genuinely open, transparent, and resistant to proprietization.
Our Zoom call scenario may feel foreign now, but it echoes this ethos of openness. When we say ‘Yes’ to being recorded, perhaps we’re also saying ‘Yes’ to a new understanding of shared knowledge — one where learning is collectively owned, openly accessible, and free to evolve. It’s worth considering how we might all benefit from such an approach, in our conversations, our collaborations, and our communities.Sure, here is a comparison table based on your request. Please note that copyleft and proprietary concepts originate from the software licensing world, so their translation to other domains might not be perfect — but it is worth trying — so here goes:
This table simplifies complex systems and real-world systems often have aspects of both copyleft and proprietary elements, and exist on a spectrum rather than in binary categories. But I can say that firmly want to be on the left side — and our whole planet would benefit from this. What would you click “yes” to?
