Consumerium License

The Consumerium Governance Organization will reserve the right to apply a unique Consumerium License to any material contributed that is fundamental to the integrity and operations of Consumerium Services. We cannot expect that existing licenses' terms necessarily prevent all threats and worst cases that might arise as companies or producers become offended by Consumerium's operations and seek actively to subvert it and compete with it.

For software, the modules that would require such licensing would be few and probably small - the majority of the healthy buying infrastructure would be free software. Control of software under a more specific Consumerium Software License would be relenquished module by module into a free software regime if the Consumerium Governance Organization is satisfied that there is no exploit or attack or low-integrity competitor that can make use of that module to prevent us from realizing any of our own best cases.

The documentation gathered may also be corrupted or distorted or published in a mangled form that defeats and distracts from Consumerium Services. This is not a problem specific to Consumerium but is shared by all groups that seek to bring safe trade and fair trade to the retail or investing marketplace. Accordingly we seek to work with other groups to develop a Green Documentation License that would meet standards of truth that can be broadly agreed by at least the ecology-focused NGOs like Greenpeace and Earth First, and Green Parties which tend to monitor both production and consumption closely in developed nations. If the information seems not to be fragile or abusable under GFDL it could be released in that form - the right to do this release would sit with the Consumerium Governance Organization. But for some information such as profiles of companies and of persons, it is quite important that we retain tighter control over what is said and specifically how the information is quoted. Consumerium Services depend for their integrity on not being selectively or unfairly quoted out of context. Unfortunately, both GFDL and Creative Commons allow this, and *will* enable public relations efforts to present *only* positive information through a similar buying-influence network. This would clearly be a competitor to Consumerium Services, one run only by "dirty" producers.

The above analysis is ongoing, and you are invited to edit it where you disagree.