Licence and governance
The marks are free to use. Three different things carry three different terms.
The marks
CC BY-ND 4.0, with one permission granted on top: you may scale them, change their colour, and convert them to other formats.
No-derivatives is what makes a label a label. A mark anyone may redraw means nothing, and without that added permission ND would block the ordinary resizing and recolouring that using a label requires.
The words
The specification and this text are CC BY 4.0. Quote it, translate it, build on it, disagree with it in public.
The definitions are only worth something if other people can adopt them and argue with them.
The name
“need2know” and this domain are not licensed. They are held as a trademark.
So that there is a way to say “that is not this scheme” about a mark someone has altered.
What a licence cannot do
Copyright is the wrong tool for the failure this scheme exists to prevent.
Someone putting the “no AI” mark on generated work is not infringing anything. They are lying, and the mark itself is a faithful copy.
Two things bite instead. A trademark lets whoever stewards the scheme object to misuse of its name. A register, a dated record naming who declared what, makes a false claim attributable to the person who made it. The licence is housekeeping. A false declaration is answerable only to those two.
Who holds this
Proposed by Oxedyne, in association with Oxegen.
One small company thinks this is worth doing and says so under its own name. It is not a standards body and does not present itself as one.
If it gains adoption, the marks, the domain and the specification move to a non-profit constituted to maintain and promote the scheme. An early adopter is being asked to put someone else's mark on their own work, and the reasonable question is what happens if that someone changes their mind or is bought.
Stewardship commits to four things, whoever holds it
- The URLs keep resolving. Badges get printed. A dead QR code is worse than no badge, because it makes the declarer look careless about exactly the thing they were claiming to care about.
- Definitions change only by dated, published revision, and old revisions stay online. A badge printed under one revision must keep meaning what it meant when it was printed.
- The marks stay free to use on the terms above, and those terms do not tighten retroactively.
- The scheme stays voluntary and unverified, and never claims otherwise. The moment it implies an audit that does not happen, it is worse than nothing.