Harmony 2.0 Leadership

As part of the Shuttleworth Foundation focus on open content, collaboration and copyright law, we are seeking a steward for the Harmony agreements and leader for the process of expanding their coverage of jurisdictions and types of content.

Background
The digital commons are increasingly important – whether in the form of open source software or wikipedia or music / literature content licensed freely, or open access to knowledge and citizen cyberscience.

Much effort has been spent on the legal copyright licensing frameworks for publishing that material: the Creative Commons licenses, for example, and the work around GPLv3. Much less work has been done on the legal underpinnings for contributions: the legal frameworks by which content from different sources can be combined in the first place.

This represents a weakness and potential friction in the growth of collaboratively produced works. We need confidence that a work assembled out of contributions from different countries and different employers will stand up under international legal scrutiny, and behave in a predictable fashion. Projects that are keen to embrace collaborative development and contributions from “outside” need certainty about the options available to them, and the consequences each path might take.

So-called “inbound licensing” and “copyright assignment” agreements was for a long time simply absent or implicit. Projects often lump together code and content from different sources under a common license without any rigorous framework. In some cases, inbound licenses exist but they are ad-hoc efforts, created project by project.

Recently, the Harmony Project set about reviewing common legal agreements and practices for inbound licensing, to produce a standardised set of legal language covering inbound contributions which also reflects some of the range of approaches, much as the Creative Commons includes a range of parameters that codify different approaches to outbound licensing of open content.

The fruits of the work done by the Harmony group, representing many individuals, projects and companies, are now available as a “1.0” set of legal agreements. They enable organisations to accept contributions either as donations or under “wide license”, and provide a range of flexibility to the organisation as to what they can do with those contributions and which licenses they can in turn publish them under.

Those Harmony 1.0 licenses are a good first effort, covering contributions from the US, UK and compatible jurisdictions. But we know that the field of copyright law is fragmented and diverse, and that other jurisdictions likely have widely divergent perspectives on language that would be legally rigorous for contributions from from, or to, those jurisdictions.

Fellowship
We are seeking a leader for the work needed to expand the scope of Harmony agreements to cover more international jurisdictions, and to refine the concepts and language of Harmony to reflect feedback and experiences gained by those projects which adopt Harmony in the coming months. The person will be a steward of Harmony licensing, with a specific focus on international copyright law and the mechanisms by which collaboration between contributors from diverse jurisdictions can be put on a sound legal footing.

In addition to improvements in the language used between projects and contributors, we are also seeking to establish a framework and network of intermediaries that would act as a conduit for content to flow between jurisdictions. It is envisaged that we would establish a clearing network system, with formal relationships between intermediaries, projects and contributors, which would use agency as a mechanism for brokering the licensing or assignment of content from contributors to projects.

In addition to copyright, such intermediaries and agencies may also play a role in managing the legal risks inherent in copyright ownership, publication and contribution. For example, the risk that code contributed by an independent developer may inadvertently attract the risk of a patent infringement suit in a different jurisdiction. Such risks might warrant the involvement of insurers, and the Fellow would explore the relationship between insurance, risk management and the legal frameworks being developed by Harmony.

Fellowships at the Shuttleworth Foundation
The Foundation supports visionaries and change agents in civil society and academia through single-year renewable grants that cover their own needs as well as a mechanism to amplify their personal investments in programs, projects or initiatives.

Interested?  Contact me directly – or via: fellowships (@) shuttleworthfoundation.org

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