Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
is born free, and anyone is free to copy it unless the creator goes out of his or her way to
protect it.
Unfortunately, this freedom inherent in hardware—in so many ways a positive
thing—also comes at a cost: virality. Because there is an existing right (copyright) that re-
quires permission for copying, that permission can be given conditionally. You are al-
lowed to copy a copyrighted work under an open source license as long as you allow
people to copy your work on the same terms. This factor has helped the idea of sharing
spread beyond communities that care about sharing for its own sake and into communities
that just need to access the stuff. Without an underlying patent, however, it will be harder
to pull that second community—the one that doesn't care about sharing but wants access
to the stuff—into the world of open source hardware.
Ultimately, only two types of open source hardware projects are likely to be interested
in getting patents. The first are projects attached to institutions that have a process in place
to patent everything as a matter of course. In those cases, because the patents already ex-
ist, it makes sense to find a way to openly license them. The second are projects backed
by individuals or companies with lots of money who feel truly passionately about open
source hardware. In those cases, the value of having a viral license that can spread the eth-
os of open source hardware will balance out the costs of actually obtaining the patent. If
you choose to license your patent, you should talk to a patent attorney, because each case
is different.
Licensing a Trademark
In the context of open source hardware, a trademark may become the most important type
of intellectual property. This is because of the trademark's ability to identify the source of
a product in the marketplace. The source is not only who conceived of it, but who actually
assembled it and stands behind its quality. Even if you cannot control how people copy or
incorporate your project into their own, you can control how they identify it.
Let's turn again to the world of open source software to see how this works. Mozilla
owns the trademark for the Firefox web browser. Because Firefox is an open source
browser, anyone can take the code and adapt it to their own purposes (e.g., Ice Weasel is a
version of Firefox for the Debian operating system). However, while anyone is free to
take the code, they cannot take the name along with the code. Only Mozilla's version of
Firefox can use the Firefox trademark.
The result of this is that if you, as a user, find a Firefox installer online, you can be
confident that it will install the Mozilla version of Firefox. It does not really matter where
you find the installer—on Mozilla's own website or on some third-party site. As long as it
