Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
permission to show the movie—she needs permission to show the movie
from the studio
that owns the movie.
Getting permission from some random person on the street will not
be much of a defense when the studio decides to sue the theater owner for copyright in-
fringement.
Finally, although many people think of licenses in terms of intellectual property, they
are actually much broader than that. A driver's license is permission to drive on roads,
conditioned on passing a driving test and maintaining a reasonably safe driving record. A
concert ticket can be thought of as a license to enter a venue and attend a show, condi-
tioned on paying money.
In the context of open source hardware (OSHW), most of the licenses involved will re-
late to intellectual property rights. By and large, these licenses will grant permission to do
things like copy, incorporate, and build upon existing projects.
Open Licenses in the Context of OSHW
It is probably safe to say that the GPL and Creative Commons (CC) licenses are the best-
known existing licenses among people interested in open source hardware. That renown is
well deserved. These licenses and their brethren (which can loosely be thought of as “open
licenses”) have helped to build a massive common pool of writing, photography, films,
software, and countless other types of creative expression. At the same time, they have
helped to raise awareness about copyright more generally. Because of this success, they are
worth considering specifically in the context of open source hardware.
The real genius of open licenses is that they take something that was viewed as a barri-
er to sharing and turn it into an asset. As will be discussed in more detail later, one of the
unique aspects of copyright is that it protects automatically. If you create a type of thing
that fits within the scope of copyright (like a movie or a piece of code), it is protected as
soon as it is created. This copyright protection happens regardless of the creator's interest
in protecting his or her work under copyright. That is why a license is so important, even
for works that no one really wanted to protect with copyright in the first place. Without an
explicit license, anyone trying to build upon that work is potentially infringing upon the
creator's copyright. Remember, if you didn't include an open license for your files in
GitHub (or wherever you store your files), they are automatically protected by copyright
to the fullest extent possible. Merely making the files public is not enough to make them
open.
Instead of seeing this automatic protection as a barrier to sharing, open licenses view it
as an opportunity to promote and encourage sharing. Using an open license is an affirmat-
ive declaration in support of building a commons.
