CC BY-SA-NS

Creative Commons has six licenses. None of them have a network clause.

AGPL solved this for code: if you serve AGPL software over a network, users can request the source. Four words close the SaaS loophole GPL left open: “network use is distribution.”

Prose has no equivalent. CC BY-SA requires derivatives to stay open, but “distribution” means giving someone a copy. Running a derivative as a service isn’t giving anyone a copy. A company can read CC BY-SA prose, compile it to code, serve the code as a SaaS product, and argue they never distributed the derivative.

A blog post describes an auction mechanism. A coding agent reads the post and produces a working implementation. The implementation is a derivative work of the post. The post was published CC BY-SA. The code inherits the obligation.

But what if the company never publishes the code? They run it internally. Users interact with the service over HTTP. The derivative exists, but it was never distributed. CC BY-SA’s share-alike clause never triggers.

Same loophole. Different source.

One paragraph

CC BY-SA-NS is CC BY-SA 4.0 with one additional condition:

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, with the following additional condition:

Network Services. If you use a Derivative Work to provide a service over a computer network, you must make the Corresponding Source of the Derivative Work available to users of the service, under the terms of this license or a Compatible License, at no charge.

Two definitions:

Corresponding Source means the complete source material from which the Derivative Work can be regenerated: the original prose, any modifications to it, and any build instructions (prompts, configuration, scripts) used in the compilation.

Compatible License means CC BY-SA 4.0, AGPL 3.0, or any later version of either.

That’s it. One paragraph on top of 4,000 words of existing legal text.

A researcher publishes a paper explanation under CC BY-SA-NS. A company’s coding agent reads it and builds an internal tool. If the tool stays internal, nothing changes. If the tool is served to users over a network, those users can request the source: the original prose, plus whatever the company modified.

Why not just use AGPL for the code?

You can. But that relies on the code author choosing AGPL. CC BY-SA-NS puts the network clause in the prose license, so the obligation flows from the source, not from the compiled output. The prose author controls it.

No lawyer has reviewed this. Can four words close the SaaS loophole for prose the same way AGPL closed it for code?

Draft. Not legal advice. Six licenses. Now six and a half.