Re: [Mesh] Peering agreement

Hi! So I posted that ticket on our wlan slovenija Trac some time ago, but I am also writing now here because maybe there are some people who would be also interested in more lawish approach to open networks. So the idea I have is that what we are doing now with community wireless networks, how we grow them and connect them is all very similar to how Internet was build in the beginning. Mostly it all works because of the trust and because we share similar values.

But as we will grow, we will face issues. For example, can our networks be used for commercial uses. Can we filter some traffic we object to? Will you transit traffic over your network from some other network with which rules you do not agree on? In general, we will face net neutrality issues. And instead of waiting that we get to the stage when things will be hard to change, I was thinking that we should learn from Internet and make one change: organic growing and interconnecting of networks is great, but let us all have a common base of things we agree on, and let us have a legal backing of that. Internet has no law regulating it, but we should use law to regulate our networks so that we assure that they are open and neutral forever. It is like using copyright to defend the commons. :-) (Of course we should also try to make it technologically ensured to be so, but why not have one line of defense more? And sometimes it is good to write things down, just so that everybody involved knows what to expect.) We could have something similar to GPL which in short would require from you net neutrality, if you are connecting to the network, and that others who will connect to you, will adhere to the same agreement (peerleft? :-) ). I am not a lawyer, so I am not sure if "licensing" can be used in this way. What is a difference between license and agreement? Can you give a license to somebody that he or she is allowed to connect to your network and spread it further under this and this conditions. And if they break those conditions, they are lost their right to connect and are thus illegal. Concrete proposal is here: http://grow.wlan-si.net/ticket/1258 When drafting this idea I read many other such agreements/licenses listed here: http://interop.wlan-si.net/wiki/Legal/Licenses Is there any lawyer around who would be interested in drafting such a peerleft (beerleft?) license? Do you know about some other similar licenses I missed? So, this is something which is probably for you very down along the road, initially this is probably overkill, but maybe some are interested also in this aspects. (For all who are maybe not familiar with peering agreements. So the idea is that you make some type of agreement between nodes connecting, or even networks as whole connect, about how you will transit their traffic over your node or network. Inside one community wireless networks this is often not a problem, but maybe you will get a person who will want to filter all porn going over his or her node because it will be morally objecting. How to deal with this? One way is to ignore it. Another is to have some organization with ruling power over all nodes. The other is to try to technically assure that this is impossible to do (which might not be viable or even moral). And there is the thing which I am proposing which is that all nodes are seen as individual entities which adhere to the same license. Whoever is deploying this nodes. You don't care. If they adhere to the license. And if they don't, you have a right to cut them off.) Mitar _______________________________________________ mesh mailing list mesh(a)lists.sudoroom.org http://lists.sudoroom.org/listinfo/mesh