The Mix and Matchable Indie License (MAMIL)
The Mix and Matchable Indie License (MAMIL) is a highly modular and easily customized license agreement template (i.e. reusable legal contract template) whose purpose is to enable independent creators ("indies") to specify what terms and conditions they find most desirable for any kind of product (whether digital or physical), so that the most common uses cases for selling products as an independent creator online or in-person can be covered by a corresponding contract and quickly and easily be fitted to each individual product's and audience's needs and context without having to waste a huge amount of time or money writing a lot of bewildering legalese yourself or hiring someone else to do so (which would otherwise potentially be prohibitively time consuming, tedious, or disproportionately expensive!).
MAMIL is adaptable to pretty much any kind of product, whether that is a complete end-user product (such as a video game, program, movie, album, novel, technical book, etc) or a reusable asset pack intended for other creators and businesses for adaptation (such as royalty-free art or sound packs, etc). MAMIL has you covered, whatever your use case is, regardless of whether your product is creative or utilitarian or anything in-between!
I designed this license because I care about helping the independent creator community survive and thrive, including myself. The mascot for MAMIL (The MAMIL Mammal) you see here and on the license document itself is humorously designed to resemble a hybrid of ferret, bush baby, rabbit, giraffe, raccoon, and horse: a visual pun that alludes to the flexible and mix and matchable nature of the MAMIL license by analogy or metaphor.
Independent creators need to be similarly flexible and adaptive (like the mascot) and need every competitive advantage they can get. Independent creators often have tight budgets and turbulent circumstances and many products they create don't make much money (if any!) or have very uncertain outcomes and so an inexpensive means of easy license agreement customization is necessary to fulfill independent creators' creative goals and business necessities practically and expediently.
Indeed: Too many independent creators sell their creations without ever even defining a contract at all (which could have a myriad of headache-inducing hidden negative legal consequences!) or rely too much on ill-fitting or inflexible default contracts that are provided by 3rd party websites and which also often don't treat either the creator or the consumer well (such as including predatory constraints or taking a hugely disproportionate cut of sales). MAMIL is designed to be genuinely and substantively different: a truly wholesome and good-natured contract template system!
All you need to use MAMIL for online sales is an account on any website that acts as a license-neutral payment facilitator (such as Payhip or many other similar sites) and which does not already specify too much of the license agreement that you will be entering into with a prospective customer. You need to make sure that the website you are selling the goods that the MAMIL license will be attached to is not one that already specifies it own complete end-user license terms for the items being sold.
Indeed, ideally the terms of service of the website you use to sell your items should primarily govern only (or at least mostly only) the sales platform and not the licensor-licensee (creator-consumer) agreement for each sold product itself. However, MAMIL does nonetheless include a provision that states that only mutually compatible legal provisions should apply in the event of conflicts with the selling platform's own terms and conditions, and thus slight conflicts are not likely to be a problem.
Thus, many 3rd party print-on-demand, stock photography, stock vector art, and other asset store websites are NOT compatible with this license. You need to use a minimalistic payment facilitator website like Payhip or a similar alternative or else (failing that) directly bind to something like PayPal or Stripe, if you are doing any of the sales online (which you probably are)! That is the only way to prevent there from being a license agreement conflict when you try to use MAMIL online. However, there are at least a half dozen good options for such payment facilitation websites (such as Payhip) and they are easy to set up and use!
The text of the MAMIL license agreement may be previewed here on Payhip, assuming their previewer is working correctly when you reach this page. Just click on the labeled "Preview" link, which should be located somewhere on this product page in plain view.
Oh, and another very notable and useful feature of MAMIL is that (unlike any other license I am aware of at the time of writing this on 2024-11-20) MAMIL supports an optional anti-AI module which greatly increases your legal defenses against systematic AI-based plagiarism of your work! So, if you're looking for an anti-AI license agreement template that adds an abundance of additional protections against such for your intellectual property to better ensure your business's sustainability and your creative endeavors into the future then you've come to the right place!
Note however that I am not your lawyer and I am not a party to any agreement that you make with any prospective customer. You are entirely on your own in that regard. I am merely providing a document to you. Your use of it is your own responsibility, as would be the case for any such contract.
As for me, I'll be using this license for my own future product releases (I "take my own medicine" and genuinely believe in this license) and I think it could really help a lot of independent creators! MAMIL fills a really big unfilled gap in the contract landscape that is sorely needed in recent years (especially with increasingly unethical big tech companies' behavior) and therefore if you are an independent creator of any kind I think you would benefit from having MAMIL available as an asset, so that you can spin up new contracts to fit each new product in a much more tailored way and much more quickly too! It could save you a heck of a lot of time and tedium and money potentially!
The original license document is written in LibreOffice (a 100% free and open source word processing and text editing program that you can download from the internet) as an FODT file, but exported ODT, PDF, DOCX, DOC, RTF, and TXT file formats are also included. The MAMIL mascot's art is included as both an Inkscape SVG (vector art) file and a PNG (lossless raster rendering). All necessary open source font files are included with the package too, for maximal convenience and easy of setup. The text of this product description and some miscellaneous info and help documents are also included. I care about making all of my products easy to use and thoroughly accounted for!
Give MAMIL a try!
Help build a brighter and more ethical future for us all by supporting the freedom and economic rights of independent creators! 😎🏞
PS: MAMIL itself (the document) is licensed under MAMIL {enterprise, commercial, royalty-free, piecemeal, attribution required, no warranty, anti-AI}. You'll know what that means if you read the preview PDF document. That's MAMIL's format for specifying possible contract variants.