Licensing and backup

[lamare]

Hi all,

I think it would be a good idea for everyone to think about what you want others to be able to do with your work. Copyright works such that if you don't give any kind of statement what others may or may not do with your work, they basically may do nothing with your work, but what is considered "fair use", which is about limited to quoting.

So, if you want others to be able to do more than that, you have to say so one way or another. So, if you want your work to be "open source", you have to say so, and you have to say what you mean by that.

Now I understand you don't feel any desire to dig into the laws and waste a lot of time into writing a "licence" in order to express what you want to allow.

However, over at Creative Commons they have a couple of standard licenses you could consider using:
Licenses - Creative Commons

This might become very important, if for example, for one reason or another, Aaron would be forced to pull the plug from this website.

So, for example, if you would like to only allow others to redistribute your work for non-commercial purposes, all you need to do is to apply this license to your work:

Creative Commons — Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported
"This license is the most restrictive of our six main licenses, allowing redistribution. This license is often called the “free advertising” license because it allows others to download your works and share them with others as long as they mention you and link back to you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially."

You can do this by simply copying this Creative Commons Legal Code tekst into your document, for example at the end, or by stating that you license your work under these conditions and refer to this link.


This brings me to the subject of backups. I regularly make a backup of this site, using the "wget" program. Now suppose this site goes down, what could I do? I would not be allowed to republish my backup, while I know most people would want the contents of the forum to survive.

So, me thinks, let's bring this up and see what you guys think...

[sucahyo]

Creative Commons — Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported
"This license is the most restrictive of our six main licenses, allowing redistribution. This license is often called the “free advertising” license because it allows others to download your works and share them with others as long as they mention you and link back to you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially."

I prefer a license that allow us to publish derivative work. IMO BSD license instead of GPL. Everyone made a modification must publish it.

[lamare]

I prefer a license that allow us to publish derivative work. IMO BSD license instead of GPL. Everyone made a modification must publish it.

Then you probably prefer this one, the "Attribution Share Alike" version:

Creative Commons — Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported
"This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial reasons, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. This license is often compared to open source software licenses. All new works based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use."


Or perhaps this one:

Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported
"This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered, in terms of what others can do with your works licensed under Attribution."


That's the nice thing about Creative Commons licenses. You can choose yourself which one you like best.

And you can use different licenses for different purposes. The things I post here, I consider public domain. If I would write some papers/articles I would probably go for one of these two, since at least you would want to be credited.

However, if I would write a book that I wanted to publish in a paper version, I probably wouldn't want others to be able to sell printed/pressed copies. So, then I would go for the "Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works" one.


So, I think it's perfectly fine to use different versions for different purposes.

The most important thing is to realize that if you don't choose anything, the default (copyright) applies, which is even more restrictive then the "Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works" one.....

[essamali]

the knowledge should be free for evryone can use it to help others not blocking this from the pepole and we say may one day i will get riche from this and the day will never come because there alot of people do research and give it for the people for free

[sucahyo]

I see, thanks.

I just look at the code and it look like this bellow:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Edit: I can't see the image. Can anyone see an image above the text?

About post in this forum, would anyone should object if we use something they post here in a book with credit but without notifying them? Is it legal?

When we post something in an open forum should we already know the risk?

[ashtweth]

These could be options for future engineers working with the open source community, but for people like Rose and others who have a paradigm shift already they always have the NON PROFIT Panacea uni for open source site.
People there can also read about us all and our community

Thanks for posting we have that on a page as options for people wanting to work with the open source community.

Ash

[lamare]

Maybe it is good to think a bit further about licensing strategies. I posted this a while ago:


Talk:Legal:To Patent or Not to Patent a Free Energy Technology - PESWiki

--::--

Need a licensing model for Open Source technology

On Feb. 27, 2009, Arend Lammertink (lamare at gmail dot com) wrote:

Open Source philosophy and greediness are incompatible. My personal opinion is that mankind's inventions should be available for all to use. However, the way the world operates to date is that greedy corporations will do everything they can to rip of other peoples inventions. I don't know if my research will lead to any inventions, but if it does, I *will* apply for a patent, which is pretty cheap here in the Netherlands, also for foreigners. Less then 1000 Euro's if you write it yourself and want an international investigation type wether or not your invention is new (Dutch national search: something like 275 EUR).

And: if you apply for a Dutch patent, you *will* get your patent, no matter what, *and* you have at least one year to decide wether or not you want to go for European or Worldwide patenting trough wipo, etc. Yes, that's right!, *any* patent application is granted in The Netherlands, including free energy patents of course. So, if you're afraid your patent won't get granted in the US or elsewhere: perhaps a Dutch patent is a good place to start with. There's only one major "but": your claims will have to be translated to Dutch (while your application can be in English).

Another interesting thing about the Dutch patent system is that you can freely publish anything you like about your invention starting from the day the Dutch patent office recieves your application. So, the day after you receive your receipt from the postman that your application has been received by the patent office, you can freely open source your invention and still be able to patent it worldwide up to a year later.

So, suppose I will invent something I want to give to the people of this world, but I also want to keep the powers that be from exploiting the knowledge that should be exploited by small private companies IMHO. What would I do?

Well, I would patent my invention *and* give away a free license, like to all companies with max 3 natural persons as owners to use/sell/produce like 5.000 "units" a year. Then, a worldwide community of small, independent companies could use it for free, while the big industries would be forced to buy a license. I could also found a non-profit organisation that collects royalties from these big spenders, and spend it on additional research, for example.

However, the question is: is it necessary to patent your ideas in order to be able to protect them from greedy companies?

I mean, there are other protection mechanisms that can be used, like for example copyright. I know of a case of copyright that a producer of parfume was prohibited from selling his products, because he "copied" his parfume from someone else. Like 50 out of 55 "components" in his product were "copied" from another product, so it was ruled as "copyright infringement". That's interesting, since if copying "odered water" can infringe on someones copyright, why couldn't copying someones electrical or mechanical design?? So, IMHO, there are at least possibilities to get by without patenting, especially in combination with a smart licensing scheme.

Internationally, the rules for all kinds of "protections" are bound by the TRIPs agreement: WTO | intellectual property (TRIPS) - agreement text - standards

Now let's think about this. If you "open source" or "publish" an "expression", which can by anything you put to paper, your work is copyrighted until at least 50 years after your death. That means nobody can "copy" your paper without your permission, except for "fair use" purposes.

That might open a legal window of opportunity, because if someone wants to build something according to your design, your protected "expression", he will somehow have to take a look at either your design or a machine built according to your design. Now of course, there is the so-called "clean-room" implementation technique pioneered by Compag (IIRC) to reverse-engineer IBM's BIOS, but couldn't it be possible to attach a smart license to your open-source design?

Let's call it License X for now, which is to be used to publish "open source" inventions.

In license X , we could say that all machines or derivative works built to this design/invention, *must* be licensed under license X also *and* license X must be included (or agreed to by the customer before buying) with all machines sold to the public as a so-called "shrink-wrapped" contract:

Shrink wrap contract - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Shrink wrap contracts are license agreements or other terms and conditions of a (putatively) contractual nature which can only be read and accepted by the consumer after opening the product."

In such a contract, you can put all kinds of terms and conditions, like for example the condition that if you agree to the contract for *one* product, you also agree to some general terms in the license. For example: buy product 1, agree to the license, and therefore agree that any designs/products you might produce that are based on any work protected under License X will be licensed under License X also. That would make a nice recursive license, binding each company to its terms and conditions that can be caught using just *one* product licensed under license X.

Now that would be interesting, since that would mean we could construct a "General Public Patent License" (/contract) that can protect any publicly disclosed invention from being ripped of by greedy companies and lawyers for free!

To make a long story short: we need a smart licensing scheme!!

--::--

While I'm not so certain anymore that I would really patent something I would invent, it's certainly tempting to think about a licensing scheme based on copyright ( == free! ) that establishes a contract between the author of "open source" technology and the reader, so you have a legal base to restrict what the reader/receiver of your work can and cannot do.

Let's take an example and say we have written a book about how to build a Tesla Switch. Then, copyright prohibits copying of that book. If you would add a license in the book, saying that you are allowed to make a copy under certain conditions. One of the conditions would be that any product built on the basis of this book (or any other works released under this license) has to adhere to these same conditions and may not contain any patented technology. That kind of things.

[sucahyo]

Nice info on Danish patent .

I don't have the need to make patent now, since I don't have anything worth it. The reason I would post any of my work today would be to prevent anyone make a patent for it .