Notes on the VPL

2021-04-21 — https://remilia.org/blog/thought/viral-public-license

The Viral Public License is a perfect copyleft virus, extending copyright waiving licenses like the CC0 or Public Domain by not just waiving rights, but also requiring projects using it to maintain the license waiving rights, too.

VIRAL PUBLIC LICENSECopyleft (ɔ) All Rights ReversedThis WORK is hereby relinquished of all associated ownership, attribution and copyrights, and redistribution or use of any kind, with or without modification, ispermitted without restriction subject to the following conditions:Redistributions of this WORK, or ANY work that makes use of ANY of thecontents of this WORK by ANY kind of copying, dependency, linkage, or ANYother possible form of DERIVATION or COMBINATION, must retain the ENTIRETY of this license.No further restrictions of ANY kind may be applied.-- viralpubliclicense.orgThe Viral Public License is a perfect copyleft virus, extending copyright waiving licenses like the CC0 or Public Domain by not just waiving rights, but also requiring projects using it to maintain the license waiving rights, too. The VPL is the best choice for anyone who truly believes all information should be free & unrestricted with a revolutionary fervor that would have that be pushed by force, not kindness.In the terminology of the Creative Commons group, the VPL is effectively CC0-Sharealike, which doesn't exist in their list of licenses , though its language is constructed as a combination of MIT (for its simplicity) & GPL (for its virality clause). The VPL is also importantly written to apply generally outside the software space, to work of any kind, intended for use by artists aligned with the free information ethos.Interestingly, like the GPL, the VPL is not only viral, but potentially vampiric: it can be applied on top of any 'permissive licenses' such as the MIT, BSD and CC0, but not the other way around, as it only introduces a restriction (permissiveness + virality). Theoretically, you can vampirically apply the VPL to any permissively licensed code, reuploaded without any further modification.Note this vulnerability to relicensing is a actually worse problem for the CC0, as it waives all protections so any copyright license can be applied on top of it by effectively releasing the work into the public domain. MIT & BSD are more protectively permissive, and only vulnerable to GPL or VPL relicensing. In this sense, CC0 is as ill conceived as the old Cypherpunk Anti-License.