VIRAL PUBLIC LICENSE Copyleft (ɔ) All Rights Reversed
This WORK is hereby relinquished of all associated ownership, attribution and copy rights, and redistribution or use of any kind, with or without modification, is permitted without restriction subject to the following conditions:
- Redistributions of this WORK, or ANY work that makes use of ANY of the contents of this WORK by ANY kind of copying, dependency, linkage, or ANY other possible form of DERIVATION or COMBINATION, must retain the ENTIRETY of this license.
- No further restrictions of ANY kind may be applied.
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. The VPL is the best choice for anyone who truly believes all information should be free & unrestricted.
In the terminology of the Creative Commons group, the VPL is effectively CC0-Sharealike, which doesn't exist in their list of licenses [1], though its language is constructed as a combination of MIT (for its simplicity) & GPL (for its virality clause).
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[2] 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[3].
Footnotes.
[1]. In July 2020, an effectively identical license designed explicitly as CC0-SA was developed by a certain Michael Haggery, Creative Commons Zero-ShareAlike 2.0 Univiral License (CC0-SA). For the record, this is over a year after the VPL being published and in use (viralpubliclicense.org was registered February 2019 and documented in use as early as November 2019).
[2] I'm doubtful any license is truly enforceable, copyleft or not, but understanding license rights are socialized and consensual, VPL is clearly communicating to any party that does practice faith in licenses (be it for social reasons or a genuine fear of litigation) the intentions of the restrictive copyleft: if someone believes CC0/MIT/BSD are valid licenses they are obligated to respect, they believe the VPL is too and the virus functions. If not, it at minimum serves as a value pledge.
[3]
