My practices tend to be to engage in short or long discussions about interesting subject matters, and if it is in private communication, fine, it's already written off as waste of time except for the learning that can happen on both sides, but I keep repeating myself about the same topics with different people/conversations, and there's no implicit permission to publish and work with what the other side has sent, so there are natural limits of to which extend this can be maintained, mostly because of time is a rare resource. If the talk is about things that are supposed to be realized practically, or even about the study and conclusions of theoretical considerations, at some point it needs direction so it can actually arrive at realizations and conclusions, and not continue to be vague rambling forever (which too has its place and times, but shouldn't always remain the only thing). The logical improvement is to make it public, so the discussion might turn out of wider benefit for more people, to justify the time investment a little more with 1:n than in comparison to 1:1, not to speak of the potential of collaboration or crowd-sourced curation.

For works that are made public, I'm less willing to write them off in a similar manner. To a limited extend, it's OK to produce throw-away demos, prototypes or small media works, especially to try things and encourage involvement. But all of that consumes time as well, and if the work is done anyway, there's little reason why it shouldn't be libre-licensed and deliberately be left to the risk of being or becoming less or non-usable.

Therefore I insist on libre-free licensing of almost anything I do publicly (licenses of works you didn't/can't obtain are irrelevant anyway), including and especially for collaborative co-creations. The time to produce them is too scarce and valuable to unnecessarily accept any risk of loosing usefulness, to not go for the highest potential possible. On one day, I realized that regardless how good and useful the technical or content work is, copyright and legal restrictions can easily render it all void, so I rather go that extra mile and ensure that a proper legal policy is in place and comes along with the technical/media work as well, so I don't regret it afterwards for not having spent that little extra time. In fact, you develop a working understanding of copyright and read the licenses once with occasional revisitation from time to time, so slapping a copyright notice onto the work or have a look at them for existing foreign works is a pretty smooth process, just like looking at street signs or certificates, Creative Commons even made a sport out of their little indicative icons. Think about all the work that goes into completing any project, if there needs to be testing, documentation, packaging, pricing, distribution. In daily life, contracts need to be read if they're important, manuals and instructions observed, procedures learned in courses, and licensing of an important software or content release just deserves equal attention. If the work was difficult and only barely was completed, it is tempting to think that it is time to rest and cherish now, the bulk is done and the result only needs to get out fast for the world to see, and as one isn't a lawyer, why bother with legal questions? Well, if licensing was decided before the start of the project and copyright notices are in place from the beginning, none of that pops up as a surprising afterthought. The later in the lifetime of the product, the more difficult it becomes to fix licensing trouble, especially if it turns out that project participants/collaborators disagree on the rights they want to grant and retain for their contributions, and for what different purposes they want to (ab)use copyright law, even more so if the work is spread to the users who might be affected from the earlier or new licensing policy. Furthermore, rightsholders might cease to be reachable, and who would want to rely on the heirs for the 70 years of copyright "protection" after the death of the original author? For software, this is serious nonsense, as it is for content/media works of practical use or importance (not so much for works of art and entertainment).

Why all this fuss as the print-era copyright regulation isn't really enforcable anyway since the advent of digital? Libre-free copyleft licenses are the explicit reflection of these new circumstances and make sure that the user is legally permitted to do all the things that the technology is reasonably enabling, so he doesn't need to fear artificial or malicious restrictions nor legal risk, in contrast to the copyright default of "all rights reserved" or proprietary licenses. To the extend the legislator gaves the creator the almost exclusive right (limited only by the expiration of the copyright term, Fair Use, citations, exceptions for libraries, etc.) to decide about the uses of his work, a libre-free license turns those rights around and doesn't reserve them or uses them restrictively, but instead grants those rights per default, so the user can make full, independent and sovereign use of his digital (or analog or other) equipment, as the creator ceases all effective control over such as soon as the work is made available to a second external, foreign entity. Libre-free licenses in contrast to just "open" licenses go one step further in actively using copyright to prevent/restrict proprietary uses, which a bad actor might want to introduce to an otherwise libre-free or "open" work by adding his own contributions to it (for which he is entitled to set the legal policy, so the combined result might not be separatable from the libre-free or "open" parts and hence effectively become proprietary) or technical measures like DRM (Digital Restrictions Management, to restrict the operation of the equipment artificially by the use of cryptographic keys against the interest of the "owner" of the device -- an activity that only demonstrates too well that copyright isn't enforcable if such technical measures are needed, and the laws that render the circumvention of such technical measures illegal only demostrate too well that the technical measures don't work as a means of enforcement either), only distributing binaries without the source code or running libre-freely licensed software as a service on a server (so the user can't obtain the code nor run it on his own, therefore is dependent on who operates the service). If it is considered fair game by the proprietary world to engage in such activities, the libre-free world might indeed design licenses that deliberately exclude such practices and instead defend the rights the original author intended to offer to his users against any such malicious attempt.

One could claim that this is using exactly the same mechanism of copyright that is lamented by the libre-free software movement. I don't subscribe to it as I don't believe in the freedom to loose your freedom, and it would be a mistake to believe that the libre-free software movement is against all copyright, in general. Take Public Domain, for example, both as the common notion of "copyrightlessness" and the legal concept: who wouldn't be against copyfraud? Or when it comes to copyright, the assumption is always that it is for books, namely novels, and if they go into Public Domain, fine, everybody can read, reproduce and modify them for their own amusement. For software as works of practical use, with the unconstitutional perpetual Disney Mickey Mouse Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, software that enters into Public Domain because of the expiration of the 70 years after the death of the last author, might be utterly useless by then. No, the libre-free software movement wants to positively, actively affirm and establish the old and new demand that software shouldn't be a tool of oppression, but a dynamic and fluid material for everyone to build with. It is guided by the conviction that the user/owner of digital equipment deserves digital human rights to do his own computing in freedom, at the expense/restriction of activities that would violate/deny other users these fundamental rights, to establish them universally.

Defending these freedoms comes down to enforcement, which I established to be impossible above. If "violations" happen only in private, there's no way to learn about them, nor is anybody affected by it except the user himself, so it is well within his fundamental rights to do whatever he feels like according to his own personal needs, as technology enables and supports it. As soon as a second user is involved or affected, the theoretical possibility of enforcement is a desired feature, so that the freedom of the one user can be defended against attacks from the other. It is up to the affected individuals to determine if a violation is harming them to such an extend that they take action against the infringement. If they decide to go for it, it is very important and necessary that the license is there as an instrument to allow/enable/support the enforcement, because without it, no freedom could ever be achieved, as it easily could be taken away by anybody without consequences to end up back in the exclusive refusal of all rights as the default of copyright law, restrictive licensing as an instrument to make the satisfaction of certain demands a precondition before the rights are granted with no base on technical reality whatsoever, or artificial or natural technical restrictions that are easily avoidable otherwise. So if the case to act against an infringement gains enough merit in the eyes of the affected users, it can turn out to be rather beneficial to be able to fix the issue they had with the violation. Remember, this doesn't necessarily mean that one has to go to court over it. The mere indication of the license might turn away those who have shady, questionable uses in mind already, and a simple request to stop the infringement and comply with the license might be followed up upon, as it is well known that these licenses are enforcable at least to the extend the proprietary software world fights big lawsuits over it, and an infringer usually doesn't want to take on a risk like this, especially as the software is offered on a fair, equal and freedom-/sovereignity-respecting basis anyway. What legitimate reason could be brought forward to justify the infringement of the intend of the original authors to the extend copyright grants it, or deny them their fair right to enforce it? Even if copyright is dismissed as a whole, what people complain about and usually infringe against are the restrictions and harmful effects of proprietary licensing and a bad default in the copyright default, so as libre-free licenses are specifically designed to prevent any such restrictions and harm, it can only be malicious actions that harm the users as the motivation to deliberately (and not just by mere accident) violate a libre-free license.

This doesn't help against copyright pragmatists, be it so-called "pirates" or people who are just ignorant/indifferent towards this particular aspect of how society fails to come up with good, proper and adequate rules for interacting with software and media works, who don't care about their freedom, rights, abilities, don't mind to end up trapped for no valid technical reason other than artificial dependencies to be exploited against their own interests, or who don't value their time and effort as they seem to have plenty of it available to be wasted.

I, on the other hand, try to do the best possible job in this area, which isn't very difficult, but few people seem to understand what it is all about. Well, it's them who will have to live in a crappy digital future that remains stuck and stagnant, and while we all will have to pay the price for it in less progress up to more unnecessary suffering, at least the technology fortunately is such by nature that it allows alternative islands that can escape the nonsense of backward human mentality.

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