Does anyone have any experience with Creative Commons licences, in regards to selling CAD files?
I want to be able to sell a file to a customer, so they can use it non-commercially; i.e. get it made themselves, but not sell it, nor pass it onto someone else who will start selling it.
There are some options for putting DRM on STL or DXF files, but I don’t like the idea of DRM, and I think perversely it would make certain people want to crack it and copy it. I want to trust that most people would do the right thing but I’ll accept there may be some unavoidable ‘leakage’.
This is what I’ve come up with so far:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/deed.en_GB
“Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
You are free:
to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work
Under the following conditions:
Attribution — You must give the original author credit.
Non-Commercial — You may not use this work for commercial purposes.
No Derivative Works — You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.”
The “No Derivative” part I figured is to stop people tweaking a part of the design, then using that as a loophole to sell it on, but I’m not sure if this is actually required.
https://www.opendesk.cc/ is a similar idea, but anyone can download the files for nothing, and they have a slightly different CC licence:
“OpenDesk is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Creative Commons is a non-profit that develops legal and technical infrastructure that maximizes digital creativity, sharing, and innovation.
The terms of the OpenDesk license mean that you can copy, distribute and use the OpenDesk designs as long as you follow two conditions:
Attribution means that you must credit OpenDesk and refer to the designs and any finished products as OpenDesks
Non Commercial means that you mustn’t use OpenDesk for commercial purposes, which basically means you’re fine as long as no money changes hands”