Thank you, EvilDragon, for taking time to answer, don't feel pressed to post often or give this more priority than it takes, at least I think there's still time for debating this.
I'm going to be a little picky and possibly commit errors trying to go into specifics, and I possibly have more free time right now than you, so I don't expect an immediate or long answer.
I'm not even sure if you might be saying something here than somehow could later be construed to be giving people more rights that you are allowed or willing to give, so careful.
I have no problem if you want to use some circumloquial language like "let's supppose Mr. A builds a device with upgradeable CPU and published schematics under CC By-SA-NC.... Mr. A allows..."
TLDR; I don't think I am allowed to do all what you claim in practice if the only license is by-nc-sa
I assume the license is
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International
?
I call your attention to:
[...]
NonCommercial means not primarily intended for or directed towards commercial advantage or monetary compensation. For purposes of this Public License, the exchange of the Licensed Material for other material subject to Copyright and Similar Rights by digital file-sharing or similar means is NonCommercial provided there is no payment of monetary compensation in connection with the exchange.
[...]
license to exercise the Licensed Rights in the Licensed Material to:
- reproduce and Share the Licensed Material, in whole or in part, for NonCommercial purposes only; and
- produce, reproduce, and Share Adapted Material for NonCommercial purposes only.
[...]
I interpret that if you give a document under CC by-NC-SA to someone who is paid to do some job that needs that document to do it you need additional permission from
all copyright holders of the work,because the reproduction and sharing carries commercial advantage to both parties (one gets money other the job done). Payment
does not need to be in money either and could be any compensation in species, services, or whatever. The judges even have room to interpret credit or reputation
as commercial advantage. Note that something that most people might not consider commercial at all like non-profit bittorrent distribution, needs an special clarification to
stay clear of commercial advantage. The mere fact that when you're sharing a work this "buys you" bandwith from peers might otherwise be construed as commercial advantage.
So they needed to clarify in the license. I don't know if this exception can be extended by analogy when looking for the intent of the license, but the license language
itself is not using any "for example", or "including" particle that might hint so. And this license looks to me
very carefully worded. It's not missing anythign they want, it's nothing there they don't need for what they want.
Also, it is a kind of prerequisite to people being able to make their own upgrades. Most of us, myself included, have no background in hardware design and would need to pay someone to produce an upgraded CPU board (which would be commercial use of the schematics).
No, why should it?
As stated in the first post: NC means that you are not allowed to SELL the schematics, make direct commercial use of the schematics.
Well, I'd really welcome a lawyer here. My understanding (possibly worst than yours) is that I can't do a few things, some of those you maybe
intended to forbid and some others maybe not ? :
- sell the schematics or any derived work ("Adapted Materials")
- buy the schematics or any derived work ("Adapted Materials") (except from the original author, I can't buy any adapted material from adapters).
- take the schematics, some parts or derived works and give it to someone who I pay for building something for me, or auditing them, or even drawing
a comic stripe about them, as long as I'm paying that person or that person is paying me and that person is not the original author. I can't do that even
if I'm not planning to sell the result
- archiving, republishing them, posting them elsewhere in places I pay for or I get paid for using (like in a paid hosting provider, blog with adds, etc.).
I'm not sure of this one, I just fear.
- if I want to pay someone so that they build, say an CPU board with a different SOC and a RISC-v microcontroller for cool factor, I can't give them
(redistribute) the schematics so that they can make sure it'll be compatible. They can't take them from here because they have commercial purpose.
- If I want to sell a device second hand and pass the schematics to the new owner, I can't if they are licensed to me only under CC By-NC-SA.
Even if they build their designs without any adaptation or derivation from your schematics, distribution of the original to check compatibility is still
forbidden unless it is not for profit.
You can learn from it and recreate the exact same device, even for commercial purposes, if you like.
Anyone can do that with any published work, and no author can forbid this by copyright alone. The only way an author can prevent this is keeping
the design as an industrial secret or patenting (or utility models or similar). So since I already thanked you for many things, in this particular case, thank you for nothing.
"Die Gedanken sind frei" went the song (sorry for my terrible German)?
You are just not allowed to take the schematics document and sell it to someone.
I agree I'm not allowed, I "just" don't agree with your "just". I think there are more things I'm not alowed to do.
Documents itself cannot be patented.
Sure, but don't give any ideas to
the sun king there at the EPO.
And about the CPU upgrade board:
Even if we kept the full system closed up, this doesn't affect the possibility for anyone to produce an upgrade board.
Only when all participants work for free and own or get permission to use all equipment for free.
Otherwise, whoever gets the schematics and is payed, needs additional license (except if he's the original author).
All your components in your PC are closed as well (I guess), yet 3rd party developers are allowed to produce expansion cards (PCI, PCIe, etc.)
This is no commercial use in any way.
Not a great example, I'm here running away from PCs in fact...
And I remember this disclaimer in a Talos crowdsupply page (
note [0]), which gives me the impression that it is not really so easy to
produce open PCI hardware. Maybe you can but then if you need a logo or a Vendor ID ...
But this is too tangent. Your point was that you don't need to derive works from something to be compatible to that something.
That's right. But limiting commercial redistribution limits a lot what can be achieved in hardware, or at least that's the impression I get.
So I'm not sure what everone is concerned about.
You may...
- Take the schematics (and other parts we'll publish later) and learn from them, modify them, share them, create a PCB design from them or recreate them and use your design commercially.
I'm concerned I can't take the schematics and share them with anyone who is paid (by me or anyone) to work on them.
Also if I recreate something from what I learned from the licensed work, I possibly didn't violate copyright, but then
how to prove that's what I did instead of deriving your work from the licensed work, might not be easy enough to prove
that people may want to avoid it to prevent liabilities, or legal defence costs. Or maybe we mean different things by
"recreate"?
- Produce any upgrade boards, modifications, etc. for private or commercial use, without any restrictions.
As long as nobody is paid to check compatibility with the published schematics...
- Use the published stuff and produce your own Pyras for private use
With your own factory. You can't pay anyone that uses the schematics.
You may not...
- Sell the original schematics (and other parts we'll publish later) as they are to anyone else
- Use the PCB layout files to produce Pyras for commercial use (unless you created your own PCB layouts from the schematics)
How did I access the schematics to create my own layouts and produce Pyras for commercial use
if I can't reproduce the schematics with commercial advantage ?
So basically, this license does not restrict anyone for fair use, but prevents other companies (chinese, etc.) to simply take the published PCB design files and produce clone devices without any development costs, etc.
You must mean a colloquial use of fair use. There's a legal "fair use right" that no license can take away.
In your colloquial use, the problem is that non restricted use is ill defined, because that definition of NonCommercial can mean anything.
Of course that isn't worse than having no license at all. Of course anyone can contact and ask for additional permission, and i don't
even thing you are going to be unnecessarily forbidding and all. But if that's all then nobody needs a license, just ask in any case.
When rights need to be negotiated instead of already granted this creates friction and limits creativeness with thransaction costs.
It's not the end of the world, but it's not ideal. Writing your own adhoc license is not a great idea either. You can make mistakes and
even if you don't people still has to read a new unknown license and that a smaller transaction cost,fidn it possibly uncompatible
with the other stuff they want to use, and stay uncertain on whether negotiate and reuse that work or just reinvent that wheel.
By-NC-ND or even by-nc-sa is used for example in music, because people is happy with just listening, and thus who want to make
derivatives if allowed can possibly do so on their own, so they can then share them gratis. But for anything that may require some
commercial services to exercise, By-NC-ND might not be appropriate.
BTW: Development has cost us about 200k EUR so far, and those costs are not included in the preorder, only the production costs...
This is a very good point.
I wasn't aware that development costs weren't included in the device price.
I wonder if you would be willing (and able) to offer additional licenses for money ?
I would be willing to pay more for a Pyra if its schematics and PCB layouts were CC-by-sa .
I would predict that we won't be enough people paying enough to gather 200000 EUR (+ whatever markup you want to put, you haven't
given a price just by hinting at costs). But hey, if I had known back in the day how they liberated Blender I wouldn't have predicted they
would succeed either, and I bet those nice Pyra renders benefitted from that success, so it's this kind of predictions I love to get wrong.
Also in the EOMA68 campaign the most demanded version was the RYF (but the price was the same there).
One factor to take into account is the price for a freer licensed version of the design. Another one might be the time. It kind of makes
sense for the price to get lower with time. And/or get lower with units sold if at some point profit from units sold cna go to recover development costs.
I hope a CC by-sa licensed design would satisfy everyone who has objected about by-nc-sa. I'm assuming the ones happy with by-nc-sa
will also be happy with by-sa, they might just not want to pay any extra for it, of course. That means those wanting by-sa might not want
to pay if others don't pay and get it anyway, but we should just concentrate in that we may not get it for free and can't expect those who
don't want it to pay for it.
I'm not completely sure of how to go about this, but after all this is a gaming community too, someone might devise a contest or scheme to
raise funds to pay for freer licenses. Food for thought...
Note also that the Neo900 which is closely related to the Pyra (including also being designed by hns) is under the free CC-BY-SA-4.0 (ie, no NC clause) license. So why is Pyra getting second-class treatment in this respect?
I wouldn't go this way. What if hns comes and points to somethign he did which is absolutely closed and decides he wants to be as closed as that with the Pyra PCB layouts ?
That you have given works under free licenses once should never be used to push you to give more. There are arguments for making your works more useful and possibly profitable
with free licenses, but "you once did" is not a good one.
In that case, we have no license to the design whatsoever and cannot produce or modify it at all.
I think this is not the problem. If I understand what you mean by "license to the design" you don't need one, as EvilDragon tried to say.
The problem is that I'm afraid, like you, that for many practical reuses of the design you'll need some license for the schematics.
Reproduction, that is, verbatim copy of documents as in when you download something is covered by copyright, and the license only allows it noncommercial.
I'll link again to what has already been cited here of the
OSHWA FAQ. I know no one promised to be OSHW, that's not why I link it, I just mean
to highlight the reasons noncommercial leads to problems[/QUOTE]
[doublepost=1480620839,1480619697][/doublepost]Sorry for editing my post 16 minutes after writing it. I tried to correct hard to understand parts. I changed pronouns when I realised that if you was interpreted as EvilDragon and EvilDragon was the copyright holder, some statements were false since the copyright holder does not need a license. So I wrote I instead. And I posted leaving some pronouns wrong, so I fixed it. Sorry for early readers.
[doublepost=1480621407][/doublepost]Sorry my part below was wrong.
What I meant is that, yes, you can produce an upgraded board even if the Pyra was completely closed, by reverse engineering.
EvilDragon is right in that. But once the schematics are there, using CC by-Sa-nc makes it likely that people think they can
do things they can't with the schematics.
And about the CPU upgrade board:
Even if we kept the full system closed up, this doesn't affect the possibility for anyone to produce an upgrade board.
Only when all participants work for free and own or get permission to use all equipment for free.
Otherwise, whoever gets the schematics and is payed, needs additional license (except if he's the original author).
