Software Freedom Conservancy

Happy Thanksgiving! We're so thankful that only two days into our fundraiser and we've already raised over $13,000. We're almost to 10% of our $161,729.
Renewing your Sustainership early encourages new donors, so help us make a big push! https://sfconservancy.org/sustainer/

And for more information about our fundraiser you can see our announcement page here: https://sfconservancy.org/news/2023/nov/21/2023-fundraiser/

It's time for the annual Software Freedom Conservancy fundraising match drive! This years match challenge is over $160,000, so please donate to help us start strong! Help us make our full match by donating before January 15th, you can read more about the fundraiser and what we've been up to on our website: https://sfconservancy.org/sustainer/#YearInReview

Our Director of Compliance has blogged about he watched it and some thoughts as well: https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/oct/12/how-i-watched-motion-summary-judgment-hearing/

The transcript from the summary judgement hearing in our Vizio lawsuit has just been published. You can read about it here: https://sfconservancy.org/news/2023/oct/12/transcript-msj-hearing/

Question: What kind of insight do you feel like you have now into how your work or likeness is being used by generative AI systems, and what kind of transparency do you feel is needed?
Bradley: "...there is now no question that the body of copylefted FOSS is a huge part of the software-assisted development machine learning systems."
"...there is no reason that Big Tech shouldn't be regulated to make these systems transparent — end to end."
"...the public should have access to the input set, have access to the source code of the software that does the training and generation, and most importantly, access to the source code that does these forms of back-end exclusion..."

Bradley's opening remarks: "I avoid using any proprietary software, but in this case, it is not merely esoteric principle"
"...every consumer deserves the right to examine how their software works, to modify, improve and change it — be it altruistically or commercially."
"For 30 years, our community has created FOSS and made it publicly available. Big Tech, for its part, continues to refuse to share most of its own software in the same way."
"Big Tech claims that the rules, licensing, and legislation that has applied to creative works since the 1800s in the United States are suddenly moot simply because machine learning is, in their view, too important to be bogged down by the licensing choices of human creators of works."

Opening remarks from other panelists include thoughts about how to protect the labor and works of creative and other content creators, the need for public policy, and a refocus of the conversation on those affected by, not creating the generative systems.

As the FTC panel begins https://kvgo.com/ftc/Creative-Economy-and-Generative-AI-October-4-2023 we heard from FTC Commission Slaughter: "... copyright is not the only tool." to protect our labor and works.

Be sure to tune into the FTC panel about “Creative Economy and Generative AI” featuring @conservancy Policy Fellow Bradley M. Kuhn at 19:00 UTC
https://sfconservancy.org/news/2023/oct/04/ftc-ai-panel/

Our Policy Fellow Bradley M. Kuhn will be on the FTC round table discussion "Creative Economy and Generative AI" tomorrow. He's joining a panel of artists, policy makers, union organizers and other activists as the one to represent the FOSS and greater software communities. You can watch the webcast at 19:00 UTC: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/events/2023/10/creative-economy-generative-ai

Our Policy Fellow Bradley M. Kuhn will be on the FTC round table discussion discussion "Creative Economy and Generative AI" tomorrow. He's joining a panel of artists, policy makers, union organizers and other activists as the one to represent the FOSS and greater software communities. You can watch the webcast at 19:00 UTC: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/events/2023/10/creative-economy-generative-ai

@clacke @michelin @josh Not yet, but we're in the process of trying to set it. We'll make an announcement when we're locked in!

@fell @anjan We just got the videos up! You can see our blog post here: https://sfconservancy.org/news/2023/sep/14/fossy-videos/

The FOSSY videos are up! Check out our blog post for more information here: https://sfconservancy.org/news/2023/sep/14/fossy-videos/

Thanks to all our speakers, AV team, volunteers and sponsors for making FOSSY happen. We can't wait to do it again next year!

Denver Gingerich, our Director of Compliance, was interviewed on @richlitt podcast SustainOSS at #FOSSY. A great listen if you want to learn about recent compliance developments at SFC and hear about some of Denver's other work. Thanks so much to Rich for bringing SustainOSS to #FOSSY https://podcast.sustainoss.org/195

We Call on FOSS Contributors to “Exit Zoom”!
After the recent change of the terms of service to Zoom, Software Freedom Conservancy seeks to bring light to corporate abuse of power and focus on making FOSS solutions to these proprietary requirements.
https://sfconservancy.org/news/2023/aug/15/exit-zoom/

Our Director of Compliance discusses the Rust Foundation's (draft) trademark policy by looking at what we can learn from the sometimes too exciting history of software freedom trademark policies

https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jul/27/trademark-history-and-rust/