17 - applications and implications

Reviewing various licenses for my final project.

What I am looking for in a license?

First of all I would like to start this week’s documentation with the fact that I was very happy to hear from Neil what I have been telling a lot of people who keep asking me why I don’t patent my work; it just doesn’t work that well for so many products and projects.
With my current project and with many previous projects I have always had many nervous people come up to me urging me to file patents for my inventions and designs, and I firmly believe I should and will not do it for three reasons:
1 - many of my projects, just like my final project, do not rely on a scientific breakthrough that has seen more than 100k in R&D invested in them. This makes it hard to file a utility patent and the cost to maintain and defend a patent on a global scale will probably outweigh the investment in the product itself.
2 - to file a utility patent(at least in the US and the Netherlands), the product can not have been made public in any way before filing. My projects generally rely heavily on social interaction, and I work by inviting people to look and feedback on my work at a very early stage in the development process. I work by developing a product with continuous feedback from the very first idea to the last ideation, so that does not match at all with the constraint of having to keep your work in the lab until a patent has been filed or granted.
3 - if (big) companies or manufacturers want to copy you, they probably will, patent or not. A patent grants no protection, it is a mere legal tool to use during a court case which you as patent holder need to start, in each country you feel your patent is being violated. By the time you win a case, if you win it at all, your product or patent can have been infringed, sold, etc. and as these cases can take years, you are probably too late even if you win a legal case.

So how will I deal with IP in my final project and the business spin-off that might follow?
I will split my project up into two segments with different licenses because I want to achieve two different thing with it.
First of all, I want other Fab Labs, educational institutions, students, white hat hackers, children, scientist and artists to be able to use, modify and redistribute the product in any way shape or form when not for profit. I do want everyone to be able to make money with products or projects they make that are powered by my product, but I don’t want others to take my work, change a few things(or nothing at all) and then start competing with my business. These groups get full access to all source code, designs and resources to make their own version of the product, all I ask in return is that if anyone makes interesting progress, improvements or other versions that they share it with me and the community through a central open platform like a public git repo.
The reason for this is that the current business model would rely on hardware sales, as I work out a better business model where it might move more towards a service subscription for the supporting ecosystem I might change the license and let anyone rebuild the hardware and sell their own version.

On the other hand, I also want to keep the option open to turn this into a commercial IoT product, maybe I’ll sell it as a development kit, but I might also explore other commercial options in the IoT sector. I could file a design patent, but it’s just a brick with studs, so instead I will focus on the copyright that protects the design files since they are a creative work. In the US this means using the c symbol, in the Netherlands where I currently live copyright is granted without the need for a visual indicator.

CHOOSING A LICENSE
So in short, I’m looking for a license that grants not for profit organizations and individuals every right to modify and redistribute my product as long as it is not for profit, and I want to prohibit for profit organizations to rebuild my product because of the copyright that I hold over the design files such as the PCB design, 3D design and code.

Creative Commons
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Here’s how Creative Commons is described on their website:
All Creative Commons licenses have many important features in common. Every license helps creators — we call them licensors if they use our tools — retain copyright while allowing others to copy, distribute, and make some uses of their work — at least non-commercially. Every Creative Commons license also ensures licensors get the credit for their work they deserve. Every Creative Commons license works around the world and lasts as long as applicable copyright lasts (because they are built on copyright). These common features serve as the baseline, on top of which licensors can choose to grant additional permissions when deciding how they want their work to be used.

So in general, this sounds like it comes quite close to what I need, but let’s look at some alternatives.

The 2-Clause BSD License
The 2-clause BSD license is appealing because it is short, which I think is always a plus since people might actually read it. This is what it says:

Copyright

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.

2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS "AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.


This license seems quite ok for me, although I would have to add several conditions, making a distinction between commercial and non-commercial use.(Good thing I took law class in college)

The MIT license
The MIT license is very straightforward, do with the material what you want, but don’t hold the creator liable for anything:

Copyright

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.


What I would like to use this license for is for snippets of code as part of my project that I would like to make public domain. Not the source code that runs on the main servers, but fun little applications like games or examples. The only thing I don’t like about this license is that it doesn’t ask people to acknowledge the original project, which I would like to see included so people can contribute back to the project with whatever modifications they make.

The fab licenence
The fab licence is extremely short, which I am a big fan of, and it is very similar to the MIT licence, but the difference is it asks users to mention the project, which is perfect for parts and pieces of code in my project.

(c) holder date
This work may be reproduced, modified, distributed, performed, and displayed for any purpose, but must acknowledge "project name". Copyright is retained and must be preserved. The work is provided as is; no warranty is provided, and users accept all liability.


This is the license I will most definitely use when it comes to parts of code in my project. This will be included in examples, libraries and other pieces of code that serve the purpose of getting people going with my hardware and that encourage remixing and improving.
The way I will implement this license in code is by including it in the code itself or in accompanying documents as well as posting it in the public repo where people can download the code.

So I found my license for the free parts of the code I want to be in the public domain with very little restriction, but what about the hardware and the majority of my product?
Earlier I said I want people to be able to remix, re-use, redistribute freely if they are a not for profit entity. So on the Creative Commons website you can answer two simple questions to get a suggestion for the license that best suits you.
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This gave me the ’Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International’ license.

The summary tells you in short what this license means, but this is not the real legal document, the real license is a few pages long.
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To make it easy for people to understand what license you impose on your work, Creative Commons works with logos that explain the license type without the need for words and provides an embed code:
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.