[ohf-licenses] Total newb asks annoying questions

[Terry Hancock]

Hi Kurt!

Glad you're interested. Unfortunately, I think you might be on the wrong
track, based on this:

Kurt Forsberg wrote:
> Would the OHPL reserve my rights to distribution of finished product?
> I don't want a license that will prevent anyone from acquiring design
> data and building them or restrict their applications, but I would not
> want another party manufacturing one of my designs and selling
> finished product for profit without my explicit consent.

No copyright license can give you that protection. Manufacturing from a
plan you have legally acquired is fair use (no "copy" is made).

Only a patent or a contractual agreement make that kind of stipulation,
because it requires the recipient to give up specific rights they would
otherwise have under statute. Theoretically, though, you can enter into
a contract with someone to provide them with information on the
condition that they don't use it in certain ways -- that's similar to a
"non-disclosure agreement". I think you might be able to legally do
something like the contract arrangement, but that's not something we're
remotely interested in doing.

Such restrictions would be totally at-odds with the purposes of Open
Hardware, where our objective is to create an information commons of
data that can be used in any Open Hardware project. The purpose of a
stronger copyleft (which is what the OHPL is aiming for) is to ensure
that the information is made available.

In fact, from our point of view, we'd rather you just didn't publish --
because showing the work to other people without licensing them to use
it is just rubbing their noses in the non-freeness of it. Also, you
create a possibly legal liability if we already are designing something
similar, because it could be claimed that we copied some of your design,
instead of inventing it independently.

So, we might be the wrong community to be looking at for your situation.

The loophole we're trying to close is due to essentially the same
problem as the above case, though -- copyright monopoly does not
restrict the right to manufacture products from a design, but only to
make copies of the design (and derivatives, etc).

However, we realized that in order to modify a design and manufacture
products from it, you had to make a copy of the original design, which
invokes copyright, and therefore provides a hook for a copyleft
requirement (and in the case that the design is not modified, we don't
care, because the community already has a copy of that plan). The
copyleft requires added changes to be shared back to the community.

OTOH, once you close the loophole, the copyleft can be TOO strong: you
could have a situation where the license is basically "non-free". So, we
have to decide what's reasonable and what's not.

In any case, the OHPL is an early, early draft, and could change TOTALLY
before being published. So please *don't* try to use this draft, even if
your goals are in line with ours.

My goals here are to get a draft that seems reasonable, and then to try
to get a lawyer to look it over (possibly approach Eben Moglen's
Software Freedom Law Center to see if they'd review it) to make sure it
makes as much sense as we think it does. There'll probably also be some
additional wrangling over whether it's a "free license" or not, too.

So, this is *way* early.

Cheers,
Terry


-- 
Terry Hancock (hancock at AnansiSpaceworks.com)
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com