Licensing and Compliance

The FSF's Licensing and Compliance Lab defends free software through license enforcement and enforcement support, a rigorous product certification, and educational resources.

In FY17, we celebrated the tenth anniversary of the GNU General Public License version 3 (GPL). This is the free software copyleft license that ensures the user's right to run, study, share, and modify software. In addition to being the steward of the GPL, the FSF holds copyright on much of the GNU operating system. The licensing team spent the year accepting copyright assignments from software developers and corporations, investigating GPL violations, and answering licensing questions from the community.

We championed copylefted projects, publishing another seven installments in an ongoing series of conversations with free software developers who choose GNU licenses for their work. We also certified a record number of devices under our Respects Your Freedom certification program, which identifies devices that do as much as possible to respect user freedom.

Along with answering hundreds of licensing questions from the public, dedicated volunteers continued to expand and improve the Free Software Directory for nearly two million annual visitors, and we made inroads with government, helping the US Department of Defense to distribute free software. We also organized volunteers to create a workaround for Web site maintainers who want to register as an agent under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) while avoiding the nonfree JavaScript the process currently requires.

Campaigns

Fighting DRM wherever it's found

In the past year, we've fought back against Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) on multiple fronts.

International Day Against DRM

On July 9, 2017, International Day Against DRM (IDAD) focused on Web-based community involvement, with more than twenty organizations raising their voices in support of a world without DRM. From blog posts to special sales, to parties and movie showings around the world, people came out to celebrate DRM-free media, and raise awareness of the threats we face from DRM.

DMCA exemptions

The licensing team continued to raise the alarm about legislative issues like the US federal government's continued insistence on forcing supporters of user freedom to fight for exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's (DMCA) anti-circumvention restrictions.

The DMCA is a particularly egregious example of legislative endorsement of DRM. It destroys user freedom, and concentrates control over the production and distribution of digital media, giving DRM peddlers the power to carry out massive digital book burnings and conduct large scale surveillance over people's media viewing habits. Even the process for getting exceptions to the anti-circumvention rules for the purposes of research or use of assistive technologies is draconian, resetting every three years and requiring nonfree JavaScript in order to submit a comment on the process, unless you get special permission to comment in another way.

Along with our own comments, we rallied the free software community to submit their own comments in favor of anti-circumvention exemptions — and passionate critiques of the entire process.

EME in Web standards

Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) is just another way to dress up DRM. The FSF and the free software community organized to oppose a proposal by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to make EME a Web standard. We called and wrote W3C president Tim Berners-Lee, asking him to keep the Web free. While we lost this battle, and EME became a Web standard, we're looking at our options for next steps. We are not giving up hope for a free Web, even if its inventor did.

Free people, free net

Internet freedom in the United States found itself on the national stage in 2017. Over the course of the year, Ajit Pai became chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and instigated a war against net neutrality. The FSF joined with dozens of other organizations to raise awareness and organize in support of net neutrality.

Tech

Infrastructure for free software development and activism

This year, the FSF's tech team made some crucial infrastructure upgrades that improve both the Foundation's daily operations and the GNU Project. The changes included running more services on hardware that is Respects Your Freedom certified, including a Librebooted BIOS and running Trisquel GNU/Linux, proving that complex software projects and modern nonprofit organizations can succeed relying on free software.

The tech team and its volunteers also power LibrePlanet, the annual free software conference. Its livestream and recording infrastructure reduce barriers to access for those who are not able to attend the conference in person. Volunteer-monitored IRC channels for each talk and workshop room increase the opportunity to contribute to the conversation. Recordings are archived on the FSF's GNU MediaGoblin instance shortly after the event. And it's all done with free software!

Additionally, this three-person team runs the GNU shell server, oversees the security of GNU software distribution and infrastructure, and works with volunteers to maintain savannah.gnu.org. They also maintain many services used by staff, volunteers, and the free software community, including the FSF's CiviCRM server, fsf.org, libreplanet.org, defectivebydesign.org, the Free Software Directory, XMPP servers for staff and members, mailing lists, apt mirrors, git repositories, internal wikis, a GNU social server, a Single Sign-On server, email servers, DNS servers, internal site monitoring systems, a Request Tracker instance, and the FSF shop.

And the team collaborates with the free software community, maintaining gnu.org with the help of volunteers, and working with interns who are advancing their skills and knowledge in working with and creating free software.

The team introduced some new infrastructure using distributed Ceph storage and multiple KVM hosts for our new virtual machines. They started the next round of upgrades, including the implementation of a new mail server stack supporting over three thousand free software project mailing lists, and improving the LibrePlanet conference streaming setup by using Ansible to manage the laptops used for streaming, introducing new hardware, and using HUBAngl (streaming software created by an FSF intern).