Subject:
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Re: Roboarm from Dave Baum's super book
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.technic, lugnet.robotics
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Date:
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Sun, 2 Jan 2000 06:42:17 GMT
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Viewed:
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100 times
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I'm by no means a legal expert, and perhaps I'm being a bit paranoid, but
I don't believe its quite that simple.
First, I wouldn't trust anything I wrote to actually hold up in a court of
law, so I'd need to hire an attorney to write it. One way around this may
be to use something already in existence (such as the GPL) to license the
models (1).
Second (and more important), enforcing the agreement would be difficult.
The burden would be on me to sue anyone who infringed on this. Let's say
a book comes out next year and the 3D stuff looks suspciously like mine.
Not exact - just suspiciously close. How can I tell if the other
publisher just took my models and tweaked them a bit? They would be under
no obligation to show me their 3D data files - not without a court order.
Of course everyone is trying to model the same physical object (lego
bricks), thus it would be expected that independently developed 3D models
would look similar. Would I be willing to start a suit (and all of the
associated cost and effort) just on the chance that the other publisher
*may* have infringed?
In the end its a lot more cost effective to keep the models private. That
way I *know* nobody is using them for commerical purposes.
Of course I still would like to find a way to release the models for
non-commercial use, but at this point I believe that if I release them in
such a way I'm also opening the door for commercial use as well since I
may not be willing to go through the risk/expense of enforcing a license.
Bottom line is that I don't have a solution that I'm comfortable with yet.
If any attorneys out there have some ideas or opinions on this, I'd love
to hear them. As I stated above, I'm not a legal expert by any means.
Dave Baum
(1) One thing I'm very unclear about for the GPL is if it in any way
reduces my rights as the original copyright holder. For example, if I
release some code under GPL, that precludes anybody from ever
incorporating it into a non-GPL work. But that is just the *license*
under which others get the source. Can I still (as the copyright holder)
release a derived work under a non-GPL agreement? I believe this just
amounts to me licensing the same work under two different licenses - which
happens all the time. But this seems contrary to the intention of GPL.
Am I missing something?
In article <386F42F0.F35E619@xoommail.com>, Jonathan Wilson
<wilsonj@xoommail.com> wrote:
> >
> > We haven't decided yet. I'd like to make them available for other
> > hobbyists, but I'm not sure I want to give them away to my competitors if
> > I decide to write another book. We really haven't dug into the legality
> > (or enforcibility) of making them available for "non-commercial" use.
>
> You just put something to that effect on the license and if anyone violates the
> liscence then you just sue them.
--
reply to: dbaum at enteract dot com
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