[cc-community] The Question of Manufacturing Copyleft

Terry Hancock hancock at anansispaceworks.com
Wed Oct 31 22:22:33 EST 2007


drew Roberts wrote:
> I was speaking to an architect friend of mine a few years ago about the 
> possibility of putting plans under a copyleft license. He brought up the 
> problem of professional liability on his part.

Disclaimer of warranty is pretty much a requirement for all free
licenses. This is just as much of a problem for software (consider a
software program that controls an elevator or a rocket engine).

Disclaiming warranty means that any warranty or certification has to
come from the user, not the original author.

AFAICT, this hasn't generated that much controversy. There's plenty of
boilerplate to draw from on that part of the license.

> Looking at it that way, you can see why an architect would not want hundres of 
> houses built from a set of plans he was paid for only once.

That's not the problem with the case I was talking about -- this is a
company that makes money from selling plans. He wants more sales, and I
think you don't have to look any further than that.

My point was that the license (contract?) on the plans DID make a
stipulation about instantiation/manufacturing of physical objects, not
just about "copying". Which is exactly the sort of requirement you need
to be able to make for a strong hardware copyleft to work.

Of course, based on the more hardline definitions of "free software", it
is probably the case that such a strong copyleft (an "instantiation
copyleft"?) open hardware license might not pass the Debian Free
Software Guidelines or the Free Software Definition, because it would
have a restriction on a certain kind of "use" in copyright terms.

But I think I can live with that. It's actually pretty hard to think of
a case where it would matter -- except perhaps in determining whether
existing designs released under the GPL would be compatible (but that's
going to be a problem no matter what license you write).

> The more I ponder Free nad Copyleft licenses, the more I see that for the 
> potential in them to flower fully, the law will have to be amended to take 
> their special attributes into account.

Not for warranties -- not unless you mean eliminating blue laws which
make certain warranties unwaivable in some states.

Cheers,
Terry

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



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