New License Design Proposal: Leverage the Kleros Court

[zicklag]

Hello everybody,

In this issue I want to discuss a new idea for the design of the Katharos License and how it will be arbitrated. This new design has great potential, we believe, to address some of the issues previously brought up with the current versions of the license regarding lack of case law and how courts will interpret, or refuse to interpret, the license.

Proposal

The core element of this new proposal is to make use of the Kleros Decentralized court for the purpose of interpreting the license rules and determining whether any specific content or use of the software is in violation of the rules of the license.

What is Kleros?

Kleros is a decentralized application built using smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain. It's goal is to create a cheap, accessible, and secure court that can be used for arbitration in a variety of contexts, from escrows to curated lists and content moderation.

The design of Kleros is beautifully simple. In order to open the case, the person opening it must first provide the juror's fee and the evidence for the case. Once those are provided, Kleros's secure system will automatically select random jurors from its collection of jurors, all around the world.

These jurors will never know who each-other are, and they cannot communicate in any way with each-other. All they are presented with is the available evidence, which in our case will include the content in question, and the license terms. The jurors will review the presented evidence and they will each make their decision independently. Whatever the majority of the jurors decide will be the result of the case, and the jurors who voted the same as the majority of jurors will split the juror's fee. The jurors who voted in the minority will lose a portion of the money they have staked in the system.

If the court rules in a way that somebody thinks is biased and incorrect, they may appeal the case and pay a larger juror's fee for a new random jury with more members to come and review the same case.

This system incentivizes jurors to vote according to the terms of our license, while minimizing bias and the ability to compromise the vote through techniques such as bribes.

How Would Kleros Integrate with the Katharos License?

The idea is to write a new version of the Katharos License that designates all disputes regarding whether or some use of our software is in violation of the terms will be resolved in the Kleros court. This has some important implications:

• We, Katharos Technology, cannot arbitrarily say that somebody is breaking our license rules and try to sue them in an expensive, local court.
• Local courts will not be asked to interpret the content rules of our license. This means that local courts with typical lawyers and judges will not have the opportunity to refuse to interpret the content terms in our license, simply because they are atypical.
• All cases will require us to provide the Kleros jurors fees and it will be up to normal people to read our license terms and determine whether or not some content or use is violating our terms.

We believe that this makes the terms of the license much more fair. Both us and users of our software will know that any disputes about their use of our software will be determined by an impartial jury, instead of local judges.

Clarification of Terms

It has been brought up multiple times before that the current terms of the license are two vague as to what content is allowed. We agree that the terms should be clearer we would also be putting effort into making those terms as easy-to-understand as possible, such that any random, reasonable person would be able to rule in favor of content that we agree with, and against content that we don't, with the only reference being the rules that we have outlined in the license.

Enforcement

Having Kleros to decide content-related disputes does not however provide any means of enforcement of the decision. However, if the terms of the license are clear on the fact that Kleros is the means of settling content disputes, then we should still be able to take a settled Kleros case as evidence to a local court and say that somebody is breaking the terms of the license according to Kleros, and that the terms should be enforced by the court.

For instance, if somebody made a game with Bevy Retro that contained content not following our license terms, we would bring it to the Kleros court to get a ruling on whether or not they are breaking our terms. If the court ruled that they were not following our rules, then we could bring that to a local court and ask them to enforce our license.

In this way, the local court is only responsible for interpreting the clear evidence, that Kleros ruled against the non-conforming content, and they are not called to interpret the terms themselves.

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This is a brand new idea, and in typical Katharos License fashion, rather atypical and controversial.

We would love to hear what you think about it, just please be respective and considerate in your discussion, and keep the scope of this issue focused on the more technical aspects of how a Kleros integrated license will work, and not on the terms themselves.

[azbay]

(obligatory "I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice" just for good measure - I've worked in a lot of courthouses and I know a lot of attorneys, but I'm by no means qualified to speak on legal matters at the end of the day.)

Ethical, practical, and redundancy concerns aside, the entire "juror's fee" situation sounds a lot like gambling to me. Whatever "stake" you in have in the system is essentially a bet, and in observing the case details you're evaluating the odds that the other jurors will agree. Then you've got the entire "appeal" process which is essentially re-rolling the odds. Blockchain-based gambling is sketchy at best in terms of federal legality in the US, but individual states (aside from a handful) have very strict rules about betting anything of value. A cryptocurrency in that regard may as well be a poker chip. Let's not even get into the larger tax implications and how that might vary by state and country (income tax, capital gains tax, other taxes - the IRS no longer turns a blind eye to cryptocurrency, I promise). In the event that you intend to only use the blockchain aspect for other portions of the platform, then that implies you're going to process payments/funds through other means, which is 1) expensive and 2) comes with even more restrictions, tax, licensing, and region-bound red tape. The other option is to eliminate money entirely, which makes the platform voluntary - AKA empty aside from people who have an opinion regarding the involved parties. It'll be a race to see which side in the arbitration can get enough of their friends/family to join up, or whoever can pay the most strangers to pad the juror's box.

There's another issue with involving money - you're penalizing people for having a differing opinion or different values than the rest of the users on the platform, so over time you're inevitably going to breed a hivemind. You'll either from have a majority that thinks the same or one that pretends to think the same so they get more juror's fees. Those that tend to lose fees more often than not are likely to either 1) lie or 2) leave the platform altogether. Although that is the same way religion implements dogma and indoctrination (minus the monetary portion, unless you're a Scientologist or one of Joel Osteen's followers) so it may be a fitting methodology given the goals of your company. Just an observation.

Then there's the separate issue of anonymity and the problems it causes. There's no way to confirm that the result of the arbitration wasn't randomly generated, that the users selected (if there were users) were actually selected randomly, or that they aren't people that are incredibly biased in the case (or paid to vote a certain way). Even if you open-source every aspect of the process, it has to be hosted on a server at some point - and there's no way to give everyone equal access to the hosting measure without exposing severe vulnerabilities that could be exploited (or the ability to reveal identity, in many forms, but most easily by IP address).

Barring all of the above, it's quite obvious you're trying to dodge the root issue: the license you've created is one that isn't going to be taken seriously by anyone but the people who already think it's a good idea (aka its creators), and least of all an experienced arbitrator, attorney, or judge. So your response is that if you can't find something regarding objectivity or consensus in the normal ways, therefore rendering your code open to "impure" usage, you'll just create your own crypto-court (with blackjack, but no hookers) to determine violations? Yeah, no... I don't think that's going to go well for anyone. Not to mention the fact that you're creating and presumably hosting this platform yourselves, to arbitrate your own license, that you made. I hope I don't have to spell out to you how that's a major conflict of interest that no reasonable person would be okay with.

I'm baffled and almost impressed that you've been able to come up with a concept that's even more of a red flag to any creator with common sense than the aforementioned license already was.

Does this system sound like fun?
Yes. It's like horse racing, but with more game development involved. Albeit with way less payout, I figure.

Does it sound like a good system for actually deciding matters, or for making your license look less ridiculous and safer to use?
No. Not even a little bit, sorry.

[zicklag]

It's clear that you disagree strongly with the very existence of our license and that we are not going to come to an agreement on that, but the lack of respect that you show here and your tone is not appreciated. Everybody in our community deserves to be shown respect, and if you are going to continue to participate in discussions in our community spaces then you will have show more respect for those with differing opinions from yours.

Besides that, you apparently have not followed the link to Kleros in my original post, or you would have found that Kleros was not made by us. Kleros is already functioning and deployed in production, integrated into various platforms such as GitCoin, and also heavily researched. The Kleros website has links to their book with in-depth explanations of how the system works, why it is secure, how it reduces bias and is very difficult to influence with bribes, etc. Also, it your comments about the insecurity of hosting on servers is unfounded and built on an incomplete understanding of how blockchains and how smart contracts deployed on them function.

We are always open to honest critique of our ideas, but your comments are not respectful or helping further the discussion. If you don't want to help and be a benefit to the discussion, please don't comment.

[zicklag]

Pushed an update to the license that switches arbitration to use the Kleros court instead of the human rights arbitration rules previously used.