Final Dissemination of Project

The final dissemination of this project is relatively straightforward - ha, ha did I say that!? After five months of Fab Academy I should really know better!!! Ok, seriously... All my design work is done in EasyEDA. Making the design public is a matter of switching the project from 'private' to 'public'. This permits anyone access to the information and the boards can be ordered from EasyEda directly. Now the one very important thing that needs to be done on the PCB design is the addition of a copyright symbol '©'. This step is critical to ensure that anyone who copies the board uses it 'fairly'. By 'fair-use', my personal opinion is that anyone who would like to use my design and modify it to their own needs or use it as-is for no-commercial gain then I'm all for it. On the other hand if it will be commercialized and sold at a profit then we need to talk. The interesting thing is that 'fair-use' has a relatively precise legal definition that left me wondering what sort of license incorporated the sort of limitations on for profit use. I also need to add that my design is based on lots of information freely available on the web. There are, after-all, only so many ways that an circuit module for a crystal oscillator can be designed. So the question really becomes what can I legally copyright when everything else on the internet that came before probably has some sort of copyright or is not an 'original idea'. First, I reviewed information provided by the Creative Commons Wiki

So the questions that needs answers, IMHO, are the following:

• What is fair-use in the context of the Maker space and the maker economy?
• What can be legally copyrighted?
• If my work is renumerated but based in part on someone else copyrighted work to what extend I am respondsible for sharing the wealth?
• How do I manage the 'irrevocability' element of copyrights if I would like to create a proprietry derivative for commercial sale?
• Copyrights can obviously not apply to materials in the 'public domain'. How is 'public domain' defined and how can it be determined whether something is beholden to public domain protection.

First, I reviewed information provided by the Creative Commons Wiki and it is very clearly stated that 'CC licenses are appropriate for all types of content you want to share publicly, except software and hardware.' Deeper in their FAQ they explain that there are compatibility issues between CC and a number of open-soure copyright licenses for software and it is strongly suggested to use a license designed specifically for software when applying a copyright. From a purely informational standpoint, the CC FAQ is an excellent read which addresses many questions in relation to copyright not only restricted to CC. Any in case, CC is not the license to use for software and hardware.

Next a quick search for 'opensource hardware copyright' brought up Open Source Hardware Association www.oshwa.org which is the most well known of the open-source licenses. There is an excellent description of the intricies. I also reviewed the Wikipedia page and that page brought up three more issues:

• 1. Compatibility with patent law.
• 2. Fundemental differences between 'ported' liceneses from OSS and legally defendable constraints as applicable under patent law.
• 3. Is copyright even applicable to hardware?

See also this article

OSHWA also states the following “Note that copyright (on which most licenses are based) doesn’t apply to hardware itself, only to the design files for it – and, then, only to the elements which constitute “original works of authorship” (in U.S. law) and not the underlying functionality or ideas. Therefore, it’s not entirely clear exactly which legal protections are or aren’t afforded by the use of a copyright-based license for hardware design files – but they’re still important as a way of making clear the ways in which you want others to use your designs.” - taken from Open-Electronics.org Open-Electronics.org

At this point, I was going to need to go to law school to understand all this but I think there are two important take home messages when it comes to designing hardware:

• 1. Hardware and software are not protectable under the same laws (eg copyright is not a one size fits all solution).
• 2. If there is any desire to monetize a hardwire design (which can have a copyright) careful consideration needs to be given to how to implement IP controls given the significant financial constraints imposed under the current patent regime (both in the US and elsewhere).

To-do

Add stuff that would be cool to investigate when time and resources permit.

Bibliography

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