Reciprocal Licensing: NatureJAB as an Anthropic Project

On June 6, 2026 I attended an event featuring the creator of one of the most interesting technologies of our day. It was hosted on an empty lot in an obscure corner of west Louisville. I ate a plate of spicy chicken and vegetables from the Haitian Exotica food cart, and admired (as Marines do) the heavily armed security team. The organization hosting the event, NatureJAB, has some 7 million followers on social media, many of whom are African American business enthusiasts on the edge of their seats to see if the 22-year-old inventor will rise to fortune on his creation that transforms plastic waste into gasoline, or "Plastoline." (Brown, n.d.)

Begin With Community

I remember asking about recycling plastics in a high school class — deeply concerned about the lack of planning and infrastructure. "Can plastic be turned back into petroleum?" I asked. "Yes, through a process called pyrolysis, but it's very expensive." I asked what made it so costly and my instructor gave me an answer that lends to my understanding of economics today. I learned that plastics were fairly new (~100 years), so it would take investors time to see the need, invest in research and finally see a return as engineers get good enough at pyrolysis to make it cheap (Dobrée et al., 2021; Sifri et al., 2021). Twenty-three years later, those engineers are Julian Alexander Brown and Morris Mbetsa.

They are a power team handling the crowd like they're at a World's Fair. Mbetsa asked for a spectator's phone, typed in a web address and told the man to click a button. A switch activated, turning on the reactor’s ignition module just a few feet away with a "thunk!" we could hear across the lot. The crowd of about 30 participants gasped.

Brown and Mbetsa's persons were secure behind armed guards. Their expertise was on full display, but their ideas seemed vulnerable. Both plan to release their work open source, hoping people will “steal” the technology and clean up plastics all over the world. I asked Brown why he chose this path. "God gave me these ideas, so why shouldn't I share them to benefit the world?" He’s trying to save the human race from itself. He further explained his reasoning with an excuse I've heard several times growing up in the black community, including from my own father. We've been told big corporations have the power to strip us of creations even if we did patent them. They told us patents, copyrights and trademarks draw attention to our work and to defend them we would be dragged through expensive trials we might not be able to afford winning. This tension comes with the territory of being intelligent, poor and black in the United States. It’s a subtle lie of unknown origin. Maybe someone made it up to discourage us, but more likely, we’ve simply misunderstood, being non-experts and too poor to afford legal counsel.

Our generation has seen our opportunities expand and contract multiple times within our lifetimes. As our sons and daughters pick up the mantle, we have to fight a resurgence of violent white supremacism and technocratic elitism the likes of which we haven’t seen, but there is a way for us to overcome the challenge. That is community.

Avoid Julian's Nightmare

Our fathers were not entirely wrong. Robert Kearns was a Detroit engineer who in 1963 invented the intermittent windshield wiper, the mechanism that lets wipers pause between sweeps. He patented it, approached Ford about licensing it, and Ford declined. Ford then put the technology in their vehicles anyway. Kearns sued in 1978. Ford deployed an army of lawyers that dragged the case out for twelve years. The stress caused Kearns to suffer a nervous breakdown and lose his marriage. Still, Kearns refused to settle — he turned down a $30 million offer because he did not want money, he wanted Ford to admit he was the inventor. In 1990, a federal jury finally ruled in Kearns's favor, and Ford paid him $10.2 million. He later won $11.3 million from Chrysler, a judgment that grew to $18.7 million with interest by the time the Supreme Court turned away Chrysler's final appeal in 1995. He spent the rest of his life filing suits against dozens of other automakers, most of which he lost or were dismissed (Merges et al., 2019).

Kearns was a European American. If he wasn't spared, why should African Americans expect to experience anything less? We don't have to guess. Granville T. Woods — the man they called the Black Edison — held nearly sixty patents, and when Thomas Edison twice challenged his patent on the induction telegraph, Woods beat him in court both times. He won, and still lost. Litigation devoured years he could have spent inventing, and he ended up selling patents to Edison and other white industrialists because a Black man's invention was worth less in a white market. Woods proved you could win the legal fight and still lose the race (Williams, 2020).

This isn't the future Julian or any inventor wants for themselves. We just want to continue inventing — continue presenting ideas to the public. This is the sort of activity that drives technological advancement, but it is often suppressed by incumbents who treat any ideas other than their own as threats to be bought, buried, or bled dry in court. Julian Brown's theory is solid. He believes that by allowing everyone access, the world can fix the real social and ecological problems the technology was designed to address. I think he's right, but with a single caveat.

Without applying any intellectual property protections, Brown's ideas likely won't be patented by someone else as they are. NatureJAB has 7 million followers who know the origin of the design. However, if someone improved or changed the design in any way they could patent that and compete against him using improvements on his own design he wouldn't be allowed to make. He'd either need to improve the design even more, or call it a loss. This is arguably a worse outcome than simply fighting patent infringement. His product could be made inferior, and he could be shut out of the conversation by the demands of the very community he set out to serve.

Above All, Understand

European Americans don't have a culture of intellectual property law (IP) for no reason. I learned about it through Alexander Zaitchik's book, Owning the Sun (Zaitchik, 2022). A story he recounts says a man brought his invention — transparent glass — to a king asking for funding to expand his manufacturing. The king, learning he'd told no one else about the invention, executed him. His reason was that "gold would become worthless in all the land," as the flood of this new commodity made from cheap materials replaced the trickle of precious metal coming from the mines. The social and economic outcomes of this public policy decision were tragic at best. Fast forward, and as merchants gained power alongside monarchs, they helped sow the seeds of IP culture. IP would grow to protect trademarks (branding), patents (physical goods) and copyrights (printed expressions) for everyone — the monarchs, the merchants and anyone deciding to run their race with a new idea.

Patents are time-limited exclusive rights granted to inventors, giving them a temporary monopoly over their invention in exchange for publicly disclosing how it works. Similarly, copyrights are time-limited exclusive rights granted to creators of original works — such as books, music, and software — protecting the expression of ideas rather than the ideas themselves (Merges et al., 2019; U.S. Congress, 1952).

Both patents and copyrights exist to solve the same fundamental economic problem: without some form of protection, the costs of creation outweigh the incentives. Think of it like running a race while carrying your invention or creative work on your back. The weight slows you down, and anyone who waits at the finish line can take what you've carried without having run a step. Patents and copyrights are the rules that say everyone else has to wait before they start running alongside you — long enough for you to recoup your effort through the economy. Once the clock expires, the work enters the public domain, and society gets to compete with you.

Engage in Legal Discourse

Brown and I agree. We're not here to compete. We create solutions as part of anthropic projects — endeavors with the potential to benefit every human's social and economic experience. With that stance, he's learning new languages; I study language theory. But reaching different cultures is about more than etymology and syntax. It's about respecting culture. European Americans have, for generations, struggled to respect the development of African American culture — too often declining even to attempt comprehension. We cannot make the same mistake. If our projects cannot reach across the red lines of east and west, north and south, how will they reach around the world?

Brown makes a good point. The racism of white America might drive us to abandon them for kinder societies. We might make them jealous with success elsewhere. I'm not so sure. The idea sounds appealing, but having traveled to Europe and Africa multiple times, I find it difficult to imagine truly settling in any society outside my own. Besides, white America is too self-absorbed to notice a black man going overseas and improving another society. They're happy in their tightly knit communities.

I'm not content. I'm married to a European American, and I still miss my people — my sisters, my brothers, MY culture. Love is what allows me to endure running my race and I think the same should be said about any anthropic project launched anywhere in the world. Loving European Americans means comprehending how best to employ their imperfect system to benefit everyone. In China it would be the same, in South America, in Europe, in west Louisville. No one has a perfect law for operating society or economy, but it is theirs.

The goal of IP is not perfect protection — that's impossible. It's to give creators options to defend their work without conflict. What makes most inventors vulnerable is that the potential conflict they bring is a lone cowboy against an army of attorneys, security and law enforcement. Outside of a Hollywood blockbuster, that's a one-sided fight. The key strategy of any anthropic project is to create a collaborative community. Such a community would be much more likely to start a war.

Share the Dream

Two years ago I was exactly where Brown is. I was planning to release software completely free, with no protection at all. Fortunately, someone introduced me to open-source software (OSS) licensing. OSS gives away software in various flavors of free, and it is anything but a hobbyist's niche: open-source code runs most of the world's servers, every Android phone, and the basic infrastructure of the internet itself. There are open licenses across each type of IP. In software (copyright) there's Apache, MIT and the GNU family of licenses (to name just a few). Among them there is one class that is especially useful for builders like Brown, Mbetsa and me (Open Source Initiative, 2023; Rosen, 2004).

Not every license is the same. Apache and MIT are nonreciprocal: anyone can take the work, modify it, and lock up their modified versions as their own. The GNU family of licenses are different. They don't require compensation, but do require reciprocal sharing. Reciprocal sharing looks like this: Julian Brown designs his pyrolysis reactor and releases it under the CERN Open Hardware Licence, Strongly Reciprocal (CERN-OHL-S) (CERN, 2020). His community gathers around the release of his book (as they would have anyway). They are not charged any money, but as they build on the designs — copying them, modifying them, manufacturing from them — they agree to share their changes with Brown and with each other just as freely as they received them. When the vultures come, and they will, they will be met with the same requirement. If they are caught trying to fly off with a morsel of the meal without sharing, the whole community of 7-million-plus will react to expose the infringement — but exposure alone doesn't win in court. Someone must hold the rights and be willing to enforce them, which is why anthropic projects need steward organizations as much as they need crowds. The crowd sounds the alarm; the steward files the suit.

This is how you run the race. This is how we get European Americans to respect our ideas. Honor theirs, respect their humanity and hack the imperfections of their systems to benefit everyone. Make it everyone's responsibility to protect and work on the project. Remember that every person who starts a project is important for a moment, as a spark is important to a flame, but the flame hardly remembers the origin once it gets started. In my opinion, that is the best part. Brown, Mbetsa and I do not need to be tied down to these ideas forever like many European Americans are tied to theirs. We can be free and continue inventing.

Living the Dream

There's a saying — I don't know where it comes from. When you ask someone how they're doing and they answer, "Livin' the dream." Marines used to say it a lot. USPS carriers say it, GE linemen say it. They almost never mean it. Said flat, with a half-smile, it means the dream is dead and I show up anyway. Because of my history with the expression I hear it as a white expression of resignation — resignation mistaken for contentment, dressed up as satisfaction with the way things are. So many of us cannot afford that resignation, and the resignation of so many white Americans is the tragedy of our age.

In my studies as a hobby etymologist (studying word origins) I’ve come across a Greek term that sheds a bit more light on the vision this article presents. Eleutheria is the idea of freedom through law, not despite law. Brown and my community have long been after freedom apart from law, driven in that direction by the Biblical interpretation and the oppression of systemic racism, but that's not freedom– it’s nonparticipation. What the Biblical authors and every legitimate constitution pursue however, is eleutheria. What that looks like varies from culture to culture, but ultimately that’s what we want. Freedom for all to live and prosper wherever they are on this planet. Reciprocal licensing is eleutheria you can actually sign. It’s open and available to every inventor. Why not employ it?

There is an Irish legend about a woman who loved her land so much she became its name. When the Milesians sailed in to take Ireland from her people, the goddess Ériu met the invaders and set a single term: take the island, but it carries my name forever. One of them refused — he owed nothing to her, he said and drowned before he ever held an acre.

The poet Amergin honored the term, and his people received the land and its harvests, because in that old tradition the soil yields only to those who keep their covenants. Abundance follows right law the way a crop follows rain. Two thousand years on, millions say her name every day — Éire, Erin, Ireland — and almost nobody saying it remembers there was a woman. Hers may be the oldest license clause in the West, and it is still in force.

That is the bargain I'm asking inventors like Brown to consider. Not protection through hoarding, and not surrender through silence, but terms — freely given, faithfully carried. If we are restless, if we have faith, we have the responsibility to create. We must gain the knowledge and the wit be clever. We must dream a new dream, and live it. I watched one igniting on June 6th, on an empty lot in west Louisville — a light thunk, a gasp from the crowd, a flame already forgetting its spark, but keeping its terms.

References

1. Brown, J. A. (n.d.). NatureJAB: Ending plastic waste by turning it into energy. NatureJAB. https://naturejab.com

2. CERN. (2020). CERN Open Hardware Licence Version 2 – Strongly Reciprocal (CERN-OHL-S). CERN. https://cern-ohl.web.cern.ch

3. Dobrée, P., Serafini, F., Gao, Y., & Bhave, A. (2021). Pyrolysis of plastic waste: Opportunities and challenges. Journal of Analytical and Applied Pyrolysis, 155, 105060. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaap.2021.105060

4. Merges, R. P., Menell, P. S., & Lemley, M. A. (2019). Intellectual property in the new technological age (7th ed.). Clause 8 Publishing.

5. Open Source Initiative. (2023). The open source definition. Open Source Initiative. https://opensource.org/osd

6. Perens, B. (1999). The open source definition. In C. DiBona, S. Ockman, & M. Stone (Eds.), Open sources: Voices from the open source revolution (pp. 171–188). O'Reilly Media.

7. Rosen, L. (2004). Open source licensing: Software freedom and intellectual property law. Prentice Hall.

8. Sifri, Z. C., Ateia, M., & Urbanek, A. K. (2021). Plastic pollution and the need for technology: Lessons from pyrolysis. Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering, 32, 100711. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.coche.2021.100711

9. U.S. Congress. (1952). Patent Act of 1952, 35 U.S.C. §§ 1–376. https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?path=/prelim@title35&edition=prelim

10. Williams, J. B. (2020). The electric century: Black inventors and the making of modern technology. MIT Press.

11. Zaitchik, A. (2022). Owning the sun: A people's history of monopoly medicine from aspirin to COVID-19 vaccines. Counterpoint Press.