Get more users for Catalyst website

Hi,

Just a simple suggestion for the Catalyst website, make read-only for anonymous, like this forum.

Sometimes you want just to check the newest ideas without the need to log in.

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The Terms and Conditions are very strict, most notably as they relate to Catalyst idea submissions. The legal language grants not only the administrator of the Project Catalyst account, but also the company Ideascale itself, effective ownership of all ideas submitted with no obligation for any kind of payment or credit, forever.

They would be fully within their rights if they used any or all of the submitted ideas without ever paying one penny or one ADA as implied in the bidding process. I imagine making the Project Catalyst microsite open to the public, by making the material less proprietary, would legally water down these brutal licensing terms for user submissions:

USER SUBMISSIONS

You grant IdeaScale a royalty-free, unrestricted, worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable, nonexclusive and fully sublicensable right and license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works of, distribute, perform and display your Submissions, in whole or part, including any information, comments, ideas, suggestions, graphics, photographs, video or audio contained in such Submissions, and to incorporate your Submissions in other works in any form, media, or technology now known or hereafter devised; and you waive any “moral rights” and any analogous rights however denominated now or hereafter recognized in such Submissions. You acknowledge that IdeaScale will share your Submissions with Clients. Consistent with these Terms and any agreement between IdeaScale and its Clients, IdeaScale and its Clients will have an unrestricted right to access, use and exploit in any way, such Submissions, now and in the future, without notice, compensation, recognition, or any other obligation to you.

In many years of working with software intellectual property I’ve never seen such an oppressive statement written as a component of a supposedly “open system.” According to my reading it has the interesting consequence of allowing the Cardano company owning this Ideascale account to use any submitter’s patentable, patent pending, or patented submission without ever paying a patent royalty. Since this right is also “sublicensable” they would effectively own the patent.

The Catalyst Ideascale front page (https://cardano.ideascale.com) currently has a broken link for Terms & Conditions in the page footer: it just points to the anchor # (i.e. an blank link). I was only notified of the above T&C URL when creating my account, during a process in which I was forced to agree to those conditions. With all the press surrounding Project Catalyst as an implementation of “decentralised governance” perhaps a well publicised link with this legal language would have made for some unpleasant quotations.

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Exactly, we need an open Catalyst website, how can we incentive projects submission with this conditions ?

I know this is the test phase for Catalyst but in the future, it will be a good point to reduce friction.

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Wow, good catch. Even though this is very probably not enforceable, I fully expect an open source Catalyst Dapp to be among the proposals in fund3 and I would support that and like to contribute.

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Open source protocols don’t care about your patents.

I agree a better open system should, and will eventually be developed. But you have to realize this is all a work in progress. Using Ideascale was a quick and easy way for the Cardano Foundation to get project catelyst moving, and start funding projects through the treasury. In the near future, these systems will be built out without all the absurd legal bull… Cardano is attempting to be a system to do almost everything within the crypto industry, and there is lot’s of work to be done. It’s just getting started. (not a finished product)

We leave the question of IP policy open to proposers.
We will fix the issue next week - it’s not aligned with the intention of project Catalyst.

Cheers - Dor

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This oppressive terms document is still in place on Ideascale after another year. An associate of mine with an innovative project perfectly suited to Fund9 has decided not to participate in Catalyst because of it. Without a disclaimer on the Cardano Ideascale microsite— to disqualify at least some of these terms— this legal statement is a deterrent for truly novel ideas.

So if the statement is truly not consistent with Project Catalyst’s intentions we’d hope to see an update or qualification publicly posted before the end of the month. :sunglasses: