Last updated on
The Mark And Go (MAG) license builds upon the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 license. It follows the same spirit as CC, but templatizes it, and reduces both “attribution” and “share-alike” requirements to the simple acts of marking the specified label on reproduced copies.
Following are some frequently-asked questions, and answers. If you have further questions or comments, please head over to the feedback page.
What type of license is MAG?
MAG is a type of public license. But unlike open source licenses and Creative Commons licenses, MAG extends the licensing terms, beyond copyrightable materials, to patentable ideas, and patented inventions. The main goal of MAG is to allow legal owners (aka licensors) to enable the public to freely reproduce these materials and inventions with the assurance that doing so is explicitly allowed, and that these given rights will not be revoked. The word “freely” is used here in the sense of “free beer”. That is, no royalties or licensing fees are required.
However, MAG is not a public-domain license such as cc0. Under MAG, the licensor does not give up rights to the work, but merely offers said work for the public to use without fees, under specific licensing terms. The public (aka licensees) must abide by and follow these licensing terms, in order to use said work for free.
The licensing terms are fairly straightforward to understand. They are enumerated in the license itself, found on the home page. Most of these terms are build on the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 license (CC BY-SA 4.0), and its detailed terms. “Attribution” in BY-SA means that a licensee must cite where the work comes from. “Share-alike” in BY-SA means that a licensee must distribute reproductions using the same BY-SA license.
Most people don’t actually know how to properly cite sources under BY-SA. MAG simplifies both attribution and share-alike terms to a simple requirement. The licensee must mark a specific label, as requested by the licensor, on reproduced materials and products.
For a licensor, the MAG license template can be turned into a usable license, with only one input: the label. This label identifies the origin of the work for perpetuity, despite continued evolution of the original work by licensees, due to the recursive nature of the share-alike requirement.
MAG explicitly allows licensees to commercialize their reproductions of the work, for free. That is, the public may sell these reproductions at a profit, without having to pay royalties or licensing fees. But again, this freedom is granted only under the terms specified in the MAG license. The same requirement of “marking the specific label” continues to apply. The licensee must explicitly contact the licensor for a written permission to proceed. And, the licensee must further samples for free to the licensor upon request, for quality control purposes.
Why not just open source your work?
Some authors and inventors prefer to give up rights to their work, and explicitly grant the public complete rights to use their work, for free, without attribution. For these generous souls, public-domain licenses such as cc0 already exist.
The rest of us want to track how our work are being used by the public, even if we grant the public free use of our work. MAG provides a simple solution to this end. Many of us want to preempt abuses of our free offer by reckless folks, and by scammers. For instance, no one wants their original ideas and materials to be taken by con artists who represent these as their own at crowd funding sites, before they pocket the funding, and promptly disappear. MAG provides a recourse for licensors should said abuses arise, by stating the requirement of explicit approval from a licensor, for all funding and commercialization of the original work by a licensee.
Given that a licensor wishes to explicitly approve each commercialization of their original work by the public, and given the simplified attribution requirement based on a simple label, it is imperative that MAG spells out how a licensor retains some degree of control over said commercialization, past the approval stage. Thus, the grant for commercialization is contingent upon continued demonstration by a licensee of a minimum standard of quality, past approval. This is especially important, if the specific label is a trademark.
Why file a patent only to make it free?
A patent typically costs tens of thousands of dollars to write, to file and to prosecute to completion. If an inventor wishes to simply give up all rights to an invention, she may be tempted to simply publish the idea online somewhere, disclosing it thus publicly in the eye of patent authorities. In theory, tens of thousands of dollars are saved, and the invention now belongs to the public domain.
But in practice, any one who obtains this disclosed material may then submit this invention as their own, to a local patent authority in their country. Patent examiners search for prior arts largely from issued patents and published patent applications. Patent examiners cannot possibly be expected to search through all materials available online, in their own language, and in all languages.
Should someone thus acquire a patent to this disclosed invention, they can then stop the public from freely reproducing said invention. And the original inventor would no longer be able to grant the public the right to use this invention. That is, one cannot give away what one does not own.
For this reason, an inventor may still want to write a proper disclosure and file it with her local patent authority, if doing so is within her means. This protects the invention and preempts copycats. This also gives the inventor the right to grant free use of her invention, while retaining control over how the public make use of this offer.
Does the licensor endorse a commercial use?
MAG explicitly disavow any endorsement from the licensor on personal, non-commercial uses. For such uses, licensees should simply make and distribute reproductions marked with the requested label. No confirmation from the licensor is needed for these uses.
MAG explicitly asks that all intents to commercially reproduce the work be explicitly vetted by the licensor, as a way to impose a minimum standard of purpose and quality. This is only a measure against possible abuse of the license for ill-gained profit. The positive confirmation from a licensor vetting such commercial use does not constitute an endorsement from the licensor. The same “no endorsement” terms as laid out in CC BY-SA 4.0 still holds. Specifically, nothing in MAG constitutes or may be construed as permission to assert or imply that a licensee is, or that the intended use of a licensee is, connected with, or sponsored, endorsed, or granted official status by the licensor.
Can a commercial license be revoke?
The licensor may periodically request samples from a licensee for quality control purposes, as stipulated in MAG. If samples are not furthered to the licensor, or if said samples do not meet previously-agreed upon minimum standard of quality, then the licensor may issue a notice of failure to the licensee. When the identified failure is not addressed to the satisfaction of the licensor within 6 months of the notice of failure, the licensor can revoke the commercial license.
Where is an example of actual use?
Marcosticks.org uses MAG for most written materials and patent-pending inventions such as ergonomic chopsticks and training chopsticks. Here is a sample instance generated from the MAG template using URL parameters, for Marcosticks.