[DOCS] Clarification needed for lawful plugin marketplace attributions

[hesreallyhim]

Documentation Type

Unclear/confusing documentation

Documentation Location

https://docs.claude.com/en/docs/claude-code/plugin-marketplaces

Section/Topic

Plugin Marketplaces

Current Documentation

The documentation around Marketplaces describes them as ways "to distribute Claude Code extensions across teams and communities." It focuses on smaller use cases, such as "teams", with vague reference to "communities".

What's Wrong or Missing?

There is no language, recommendations, admonitions, or information pertaining to third-party licensing or attribution. The schema has, i believe, one field for the author, and one for the license, or a LICENSE file. This suggests a scenario in which there is a single author who has the rights to distribute all of the resources in their marketplace. This is quite plainly not the case. I saw one person today advertising a marketplace with over 6000 resources. Either Alan Turing has come back from the dead and decided to write Claude Code plugins, or there is widespread violation of software licenses being promoted through this feature/platform.

Suggested Improvement

(1) Include explicit, strong language informing users about basic principles of software licenses, and referring them to appropriate sources if they need more information. I suspect that for the large majority, if they find something on GitHub, and they see the words MIT, they basically think that it's "public domain" - well, who can blame them, software licenses are complicated, and maybe nobody has informed them about the rights that are attached to open source software. It's the responsibility of this platform to provide this minimal level of notification that when creating a Marketplace, you must understand and respect the rights of the authors, if you are distributing third-party resources. Failure to do so seems to me equivalent to hosting a platform like YouTube or even a BitTorrent site, and making no attempt to enforce, or even encourage, compliance with the law.

(2) Include specific recommendations and extend the documented structure/directory structure for a plugin with concrete advice about how to properly respect third-party licenses.

(3) If possible, introduce some technical measures to automatically detect, validate, or correct these violations.

Impact

High - Prevents users from using a feature

Additional Context

Claude Code users are generally extremely generous when you consider the amount of open source material that's available on GitHub. I think Anthropic should set a good example that these developers are incredibly important for this community, and should make a strong effort to support this amazing wealth of open source material by informing/reminding people that open source does not always mean "public domain."

[github-actions[bot]]

This issue has been inactive for 30 days. If the issue is still occurring, please comment to let us know. Otherwise, this issue will be automatically closed in 30 days for housekeeping purposes.

[hesreallyhim]

This issue has been inactive for 30 days. If the issue is still occurring, please comment to let us know. Otherwise, this issue will be automatically closed in 30 days for housekeeping purposes.

yes it's still occurring. no action has been taken nor has any language been added to the documentation site as far as I am aware, as of 2 minutes ago.