I Don't Know Law,
But I Generated an
Honest License
Starter Pack.

The Problem of AI Authorship Uncertainty

I've noticed that everybody is just pretending we're making art, code, and so on. I have projects I want to share, but I don't know how much of the content is legally mine to share. I want to point out this uncertainty to anyone thinking about using my work, and try to insulate myself from accidentally catching a copyright infringement case while I'm at it.

Every IDK license grants rights only to the extent the author legally can, and leaves it as an exercise for the reader to determine where that line is. The copyright, patents, and multi-license clauses are all wrapped in language to this effect.

Backwards Compatible Fallback License Grants

We're not trying to make yet another competing standard, we're trying to offload the responsibility of determining how the law works to the people deciding to use our “creative” output. Our most permissive license has a public domain dedication and 15 fallbacks, and even our most restrictive license is backwards compatible with AGPL. While most of our fallback licenses are embedded in license text itself for maximum legal enforceability across jurisdictions, our more permissive licenses use a compatibility grant for copyleft licensing without embedding those texts directly to mitigate against false positives from software detecting copyleft code.

Four Flavors

I was originally just gonna make a maximally permissive license, but then I thought to myself, “why not burn some more tokens and make something for my copyleft buddies, too?” We ended up with the original IDK license for the Real Ones who know that Information Wants to Be Free, a license with attribution requirements for the MIT et al. crowd, a strong copyleft license with backwards compatibility for AGPL, and a weaker copyleft license that additionally allows GPL and EUPL compatible licensing.

Patent Non-Assertion

Each flavor has a promise not to assert any patents the author may hold with defensive termination if a recipient sues claiming the published work itself infringes their patents. For the strong and weak copyleft flavors this clause is viral.

Clear Boundaries

Each flavor comes with a prompt to generate a modified license including footnotes that document work in a project that is licensed under different terms. Variant licenses with footnotes have all of the license names identified embedded in their file names, making it easy for somebody looking at your project to recognise restrictive terms in dependencies while still allowing you to release your particular contributions in the most permissive form you want (e.g. the With These Footnotes variant of the classic IDK license could be used to release code that has an AGPL dependency, and since the IDK license includes AGPL as a fallback to the greatest extent possible this has a valid use case in itself while also allowing the possibility that somebody could do a clean room implementation of the AGPL dependency in the future and use your contributions under more permissive terms), ending up with a license name like LICENSE-IDK-WTF--AGPL-3.0-only.md or LICENSE-IDK-WTF--AGPL-3.0-or-later.md depending on the details of the dependency.