Welcome to the DMCA Cooperation Pledge drafting process.

[Bradley M. Kuhn]

As seen at <https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2020/nov/30/dmca-pledge/>, today
Conservancy announced a public drafting process for the DMCA Cooperation
Pledge.  As I wrote in the blog post announcing it, I was frankly surprised
at the level of interest that I've received from companies who may be
willing to take this pledge or promote it.

However, everyone that I've spoken to privately about it has some concerns
and issues.  We're all generally agreed that the goal of the pledge: to
assure that legitimate FOSS projects acting in good faith have time to
discuss and negotiate with a for-profit copyright enforcer before a DMCA
takedown notice hits their service provider.  But, the details of drafting
this so that bad actors can't abuse it is a complicated process — similar to
the process needed in drafting license Additional Permissions and the like.

We at Conservancy realized that while this is a small project and doesn't
really serve to solve the larger problems with the DMCA (and in particular
§1201), that the project is worth doing not only because it helps to make
the existing rules easier and less jarring for FOSS projects, but also
because it's an opportunity to engage in the kinds of transparent policy
making processes we'd like to see more in the FOSS world.  (In the past,
cooperation commitments and pledges like this have been drafted in secret
and presented as a fait accompli to the FOSS community; even for a small one
like this one, we want to assure that those mistakes aren't repeated.)

I've put my two versions of the draft into the Git repository here:
  https://k.sfconservancy.org/dmca-pledge

I realize that Kallithea is not a commonly used collaboration site and I
don't blame you all if you don't have time to get to know it as well as you
know the more famous proprietary ones.  Thus, I suggest three different
methods of collaboration other than merge requests on Kallithea:

 * If you want, just send patch series, as they do in the Git project
   itself, generated with git format-patch.

 * Simply post suggestions and ideas here and I'll keep them in branches and
   when consensus seems to be reached, I'll add them to the `main` branch
   (properly crediting drafters, of course).

 * For those company employees who feel they can't post publicly, feel free
   to send me private feedback and I'll post it anonimized here.


On that last point, I want to be clear that as a matter of project policy,
and similar to other public drafting processes like FSF's GPLv3 process,
please don't assume that anyone posting here — even from a company email
address — is committing that they're company will sign on to this pledge
and/or accept it as official and/or preferred policy in any way.  The goal
here is for folks inside organizations to give feedback of the nature: “Hey,
if it said this, I suspect my job of convincing my employer to accept it
will be easier”.

Thanks all for joining us!

The current draft, as it stands in main at the time of posting in
`pledge.txt` is as follows:

We pledge that, regarding any and all alleged copyright infringement and/or
alleged promulgation of circumvention techniques, by any software project
that is licensed in good faith under an OSI-Approved License, that we will
give notice to the project, and take no action of copyright enforcement or
other legal action (including but not limited to DMCA takedown due to
copyright infringement or DMCA §1201 violations), for at least 30 days from
the date of notice of our concerns made to the project.

-- 
Bradley M. Kuhn - he/him
Policy Fellow & Hacker-in-Residence at Software Freedom Conservancy
========================================================================
Become a Conservancy Supporter today: https://sfconservancy.org/supporter