Re: Hardware licensing (fwd)

[Ian Carr-de Avelon <avelon@emit.pl>]

>> graham@belegost.mit.edu wrote:
>> (or was it Ian ?)
Yes it was me, Ian.

>> > 2)  The established way that companies go about sharing hardware designs is
>> > the Non-Disclosure-Agreement. I propose that we should have an OpenNDA.
>> <snip>
>> 
>> for me, that's pure nonsense. i think that it is absurd to say
>> that something is both open and closed. the "bad habit" of putting
>> the "open" prefix on any word has struck again.
I'm sorry you take that attitude. It is Open in that it is intended to
be Open to anyone to sign and get access to the know how. Not all
NDAs are made available to anyone who wants it. It is also Open
to emphasise that the idea is that information is opened up. This
is just a step along the way. 

>> here, it's not only about "openness", but freedom. you have written
>> about "the GPL's infectious character" and you propose the contrary.
I don't think so. I propose that those who use designs covered by the
OpenNDA have to make the full design available to the end user, and they
in turn can make that design available to anyone who signs the OpenNDA.
This is the same as the GPL, except that signing your rights away is
done not by the programer, but by parliament, congress etc. The 
legislatur have accepted that seeing a program does not give you the 
rights of the person who wrote it, seeing a hardware design more
or less does.
  
>P.S.  I agree with your assessment that "OpenNDA" is probably not
>workable.
>      The problem is that (a few recent California court cases
>notwithstanding),
>      NDAs do not really protect information, they only allow the law to
>be
>      used as a club against people who either (a) acquired the
>information
>      illegally, or (b) acquired the information legally, but violated
>some
>      agreement on the use of the information.
>
>      This means that a minor, a poor person, someone in a different
>country,
>      or any one of a number of categories of people who you cannot
>reasonably
>      punish, can "liberate" your information and republish it in such a
>fashion
>      that anybody else can use it.  Your information is now not any
>kind of
>      secret, not even an open one.  The only recourse you have to fall
>back
>      on is copyright law,
Obviously the OpenNDA would not stop you using copyright law, if/where
you can get it to hold. If there were a major community established,
and open hardware had some economic importance, we could probably
lobby and get a law which would do exactly what we would like. Until
that point is reached, it is largely a bluff and as long as people
like RMS will assure everyone that redrawing a schematic gives you
a new schematic which is not covered by the copyright of the original
schematic, too many people will call your bluff. If you have and NDA
with the exact same wording as eg IBM's NDA, if the court lets some 
slime bag get off with using open designs and not giving back their
full design, IBM has to be interested in funding the appeal or they
have to kiss goodbye to all their NDAs. This does not sound like 
a bluff any more. I think designers might try it and we may have 
that significant community before we hit any serious slime balls.

I initially thought of the Magic Circle who have passed magic tricks
freely around amongst themselves for generations, without and major
problems I know of. I don't see any reason to think that engineers
have less moral fibre than entertainers. But I could be wrong.
 

>there
>      is no question that the value of copyright protection is
>independent
>      of any disclosure agreement -- disclosure will not negatively
>affect
>      the protection.  
This sounds like more of an argument for belt and braces.


Yours
Ian