[cc-community] The Question of Manufacturing Copyleft

Terry Hancock hancock at anansispaceworks.com
Tue Oct 30 18:33:53 EST 2007


Hi All,

I don't know if this is the appropriate forum, but I'm hoping to find
some fresh perspectives on a problem that exists with Open Hardware
licensing. This is not really a question about Creative Commons
licenses, since none of them carry a "source code" requirement, but it
is about free culture in general.

The problem occurs when trying to emulate the free software model of
copyleft with regard to hardware products.

In this view, the "compilation" step for hardware is the physical
*manufacturing* of individual objects from a copylefted design. From
this PoV, a "copyleft" would need to apply to the manufacturing step,
not just steps which copy the design.

In general, though, manufactured objects are not covered by copyright
(there may be a few exceptions, but most products aren't).

So, for example, it is not generally the case (or so I believe) that
building circuit boards based on a copyrighted design constitutes
"copying" the design (or "deriving" from it, either).

I believe that for the purposes of copyright, such practices are simply
"use", which is generally unregulated.

This means that the copyleft on a license like the GPL breaks down at
the manufacturing step. Unless a manufacturer has a compelling reason to
distribute their derived plans for an object, they have no obligation to
share their improvements under the GPL (or so I believe).

However, for a strong hardware copyleft, we would ideally like the
manufacturing and distribution of products from an original or derived
Open Hardware design to impose a copyleft requirement -- i.e. that the
end user would be entitled to receive a copy of the design from which
the product was made. Or put the other way, the manufacturer would be
obliged to provide access to such data.

Can a license on the design documents require such a thing in an
enforceable way?

I have heard claims that copyleft cannot enforce anything beyond the
limits of copyright. I've also heard claims that it can.

Even if it can, there must be limits on how broad such a copyleft can be.

Unfortunately, most of the people doing the claiming have no legal
background, and neither do I. So I don't know what to believe.

I wish for the present not to discuss the *ethics* of this kind of
copyleft -- that's a whole other can of worms, so to speak. But for the
present, I'd just like to know if such a license is a legal possibility.

Cheers,
Terry

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



More information about the cc-community mailing list