As fancy primates, we regularly produce bits of interesting human-made ephemera as part of our ongoing creative explorations.
Some of these are easily shareable.
Historically, it’s been possible to offer such goodies under extremely permissive Creative Commons licenses. In the age of “artificially intelligent” machines mulching all of human expression and creativity, there’s a need to be clear that we want people to play with our toys.
In short, we made a ridiculous thing with our silly human brains, using our filthy human hands, in order to inspire our messy human hearts.
It is with strong encouragement, and a few simple rules, that we invite you to use your brains, hands, and hearts to play along with us.
No part of a work under this license may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purposes of training autonomous agents, generating anything created by artificial intelligence (AI), any form of data mining/scraping, or related systems and technologies.
No part of a work under this license may be used or reproduced in any manner by organizations or businesses with more than fifty (50) employees. An exception is granted to allow ISPs and other hosting services to reproduce the work for the purposes of display and distribution.
No part of a work under this license may be used or reproduced in any manner which promotes bigotry of any kind. This includes but is not limited to fascism, racism, sexism, misogyny, ableism, transphobia (including erasure and/or denial of nonbinary identities), homophobia, ageism, sane-ism (including denial of multiplicity and/or plurality), and discrimination against non-human identities.
Any use of any form of a work under this license must include an attribution crediting the original creators for their contribution.
Beyond these restrictions, a work under this license is otherwise released by its creator for exploring, playing with, remixing, and enjoyment.
Go make something beautiful.
The Filthy Human Hands License was created by Russ Sharek and Liam Woodard
For more information: https://whirling.top/fhh
2026-03-02 - Filthy Human Hands (FHH) Licence v1.0 released.
Frequently Asked Questions.
It may come as an uncomfortable surprise to discover that everything in the known world is actually made up, including this license.
Discomfort can be an excellent teacher. If it helps, the authors of this license are fairly certain that the reader is as real as they are.
Copyright law, as written and enforced, protects the interests of large corporations. As such, it’s likely that you are correct. This is likely true of any open or permissive license.
As clowns, we’re especially human. However, a number of our dear friends don’t identify as such. We wanted to include their wondrous creativity, so we broadened the anti-discrimination clause a bit to make room.
The potential sentience of LLMs, overglorified search engines, world-burning grift machines, or the toaster in our kitchen is not a topic we are interested in debating. The sentience of our protogen, cyborg, and human/machine hybrid friends is respected despite its absolute ability to muddy this issue.
The EU defines the upper limit of a “small business” as having fifty (50) or less employees.
Mark Twain once said that the only thing worse than a young pessimist was an old optimist.
Some (actual) clowns wrote it so they could give away some creative stuff.
Russ Sharek and Liam Woodard.
Additionally, some friends from the small internet provided useful resources and ideas:
The Filthy Human Hands License is licensed under the Filthy Human Hands License. An attribution to its creators is listed in the LICENSE itself.
Follow its guidelines, and have fun!
During renovation of the Delrita Reading Room in This Old Clown House, Russ Sharek put a paint covered hand on the wall and photographed it. The photo was later manipulated using Inkscape, and the handprint extracted in vector form.
The resulting SVG file is available for use under the Filthy Human Hands v1.0 License.
One of the unfortunate realities of the internet is that websites come and go. So we can ensure that the project thrives despite these sorts of challenges, we’ve set up an official URL which redirects to wherever the project might move over time. To be sure you’re always getting the “official” version of the site, please link to https://whirling.top/fhh