[Discuss] Publish OSHW with CC0?

[Roy Nielsen]

Hello,

Maybe it's time for a group of people to go to lawmakers to create copyleft
law(s) that balance out the closed nature of patent law.  Or work on
changing patent law to have copyleft provisions.

Do you think companies will give more respect to copyleft patent law rather
than copyleft design documents?

Regards,
-Roy


On Wed, Nov 5, 2014 at 5:31 AM, Javier Serrano <Javier.Serrano at cern.ch>
wrote:

> On 11/05/2014 01:05 PM, Wouter Tebbens wrote:
>
> > But replicating copyleft in hardware is clearly much harder as Alicia
> > says. Copyright based licenses may apply to documentation, design files
> > etc, but do not prevent people to reuse that information in
> > non-free/-open hardware, as the hardware itself is not protected.
>
> This is exactly the same in free software. I can take ideas from the
> source code of emacs and write my own proprietary editor. Because the
> task for writing an editor from scratch is not trivial, I will think
> twice and probably decide to contribute whatever new feature I want to
> emacs itself. The power of copyleft grows with the complexity of the
> sources it protects, and is nearly zero for trivial work. The same
> happens with hardware. While hardware is definitely different from
> software, I think there is a large family of hardware (that manufactured
> from copyrightable design files) where this difference is not so big.
>
> There is (at least) one respect in which the non-copyrightability of
> hardware leads to an undesirable outcome, and that is our inability to
> fully guarantee that, under all circumstances, should the original
> designer wish so, recipients of open hardware always get access to the
> design files. Copyleft does that for software: if you get the binary you
> can always have access to the sources. We did our best in CERN OHL v1.2
> using the concept of "Documentation Location Notice", inspired by Eli
> Greenbaum's paper on 3D-printing [1], but I am very interested in any
> other ways of tackling this important problem, hopefully not involving
> patents.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Javier
>
> [1]
>
> http://jipel.law.nyu.edu/2013/04/three-dimensional-printing-and-open-source-hardware/
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