# Outreach Letter: Electronic Frontier Foundation

**Date:** 22 November 2025
**To:** Electronic Frontier Foundation
**From:** Palimpsest Stewardship Council
**Subject:** Protecting Creator Rights and Cultural Context in the Age of AI

---

Dear Electronic Frontier Foundation,

We write to you as fellow defenders of digital rights, innovation, and individual autonomy in technological systems. For over thirty years, the EFF has been at the forefront of protecting civil liberties in the digital world, from defending encryption to challenging surveillance, from protecting fair use to ensuring internet freedom.

## The Palimpsest License: Digital Rights for Creative Expression

The **Palimpsest License** addresses an emerging frontier in digital rights: the protection of creators whose works are consumed by artificial intelligence systems without meaningful consent, attribution, or respect for cultural context. As generative AI reshapes creative industries, we face novel challenges that existing copyright frameworks struggle to address.

## The Digital Rights Challenge of Our Era

The current landscape presents troubling paradoxes:

1. **Consent Without Context** – Artists and writers often discover their works have been used to train AI systems only after the fact, with no meaningful opportunity for informed consent.

2. **Attribution Stripped by Design** – AI systems that train on millions of works produce outputs that obscure rather than acknowledge their sources, undermining attribution norms that benefit the creative ecosystem.

3. **Cultural Appropriation at Scale** – Indigenous narratives, diaspora stories, and cultural heritage are extracted from context and commodified without community consultation or benefit-sharing.

4. **The "Openness" Paradox** – Works shared under open licenses are often treated as fair game for unlimited AI training, even when such use conflicts with the original creator's intent.

## How Palimpsest Addresses These Challenges

### 1. Informed Consent for AI Training
Palimpsest requires explicit, informed consent before works can be used to train non-interpretive AI systems. This isn't a blanket prohibition—it's an insistence on **meaningful choice**, parallel to EFF's advocacy for informed consent in data collection.

### 2. Quantum-Proof Traceability
We implement **synthetic lineage tags**—machine-readable metadata that persists through AI-generated derivatives. This ensures attribution survives even as technology evolves, including quantum computing advances that may compromise current cryptographic methods.

### 3. Cultural Context Preservation
Palimpsest mandates preservation of **emotional lineage**—the cultural context, symbolic meaning, and narrative intent embedded in creative works. This prevents the "flattening" that occurs when AI systems strip context from trauma narratives, mythological works, or cultural heritage.

### 4. Layered Protection Without Prohibiting Innovation
Like EFF's advocacy for fair use, Palimpsest enables legitimate remix and adaptation whilst establishing clear boundaries against exploitation. Creators can specify:
- Which AI applications require consent
- How attribution must be provided in synthetic outputs
- What constitutes respectful versus appropriative use

## Legal Framework and Governance

Operating under Dutch law (primary jurisdiction) with Scottish court enforcement, Palimpsest employs a bilingual (Dutch/English) framework that balances European legal standards with global accessibility.

The **Palimpsest Stewardship Council**—comprising creators, legal experts, technologists, and cultural advocates—governs through transparent, community-driven processes, reflecting EFF's own commitment to democratic technology governance.

## Alignment with EFF's Mission

We see profound alignment between our efforts:

- **Both defend individual autonomy** – ensuring people control how their creative expression is used by powerful systems.
- **Both champion transparency** – requiring disclosure of how AI systems use training data.
- **Both balance rights** – protecting creators whilst enabling innovation and cultural participation.
- **Both prepare for technological futures** – addressing quantum computing, AGI, and other emerging capabilities.

## Potential Areas of Concern and Our Response

We anticipate EFF may have questions about potential conflicts with fair use, freedom of expression, or innovation. We welcome that scrutiny:

### On Fair Use
Palimpsest is designed to **complement, not replace** fair use. It provides contractual mechanisms for creators who wish to set terms beyond statutory minimums, similar to how CC licenses provide permissions beyond fair use.

### On Innovation
We do not seek to prohibit AI development. Rather, we insist that innovation proceed with **creator consent and appropriate attribution**—a stance parallel to EFF's position that data-driven innovation should respect user privacy and autonomy.

### On Enforcement
We recognise the challenges of cross-border enforcement in digital contexts. Palimpsest's multi-jurisdictional framework (Dutch law + Scottish courts) reflects pragmatic implementation whilst establishing symbolic legal standing.

## Proposed Collaboration Opportunities

We would welcome EFF's perspective and potential partnership in the following areas:

### 1. Policy Advocacy on AI Training Data
Collaborating on positions regarding:
- Transparency requirements for AI training datasets
- Consent mechanisms for using creative works in training
- Attribution standards for AI-generated content
- Cultural heritage protections in synthetic content generation

### 2. Fair Use and AI: Joint Research
Exploring how fair use doctrine applies to AI training, and where contractual licensing (like Palimpsest) provides necessary supplementary protections.

### 3. Technical Standards for Creator Rights
Developing open standards for:
- Machine-readable consent metadata
- Synthetic lineage tags in AI outputs
- Attribution persistence across AI transformations

### 4. Educational Resources
Creating accessible guides that help creators understand:
- Their rights regarding AI training
- When existing protections (copyright, fair use) suffice
- When additional contractual terms (like Palimpsest) may be appropriate

### 5. Digital Rights Advocacy
Coordinating on campaigns to ensure AI development respects creator autonomy, cultural context, and meaningful consent.

## Invitation to Dialogue

We would be honoured to present the Palimpsest framework to EFF and explore where our missions align. We recognise that digital rights advocacy requires balancing competing interests, and we value EFF's decades of experience navigating such complexity.

Would you be available for an initial conversation? We are flexible regarding format—video conference, written exchange, or in-person meeting should schedules permit.

## Contact Information

**Palimpsest Stewardship Council**
Email: [contact information to be provided]
Repository: https://github.com/[repository-path]
Documentation: [documentation URL]

Thank you for your consideration. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has shown that principled advocacy can protect digital rights whilst enabling innovation. We aspire to extend those principles to ensure creative expression retains its meaning, attribution, and cultural context in the age of artificial intelligence.

With deep respect for your mission and work,

**The Palimpsest Stewardship Council**

---

## Appendices Available Upon Request

- Full text of Palimpsest License v0.4 (English and Dutch)
- Technical specifications for synthetic lineage tags and AI consent mechanisms
- Legal analysis: Fair use, AI training, and contractual licensing
- Case studies: Cultural appropriation, trauma narratives, and AI training
- Comparative frameworks: Palimpsest and existing digital rights protections
