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Re: [ox] open hardware design



On Tuesday, 14. August 2001 23:35, Graham Seaman wrote:
On Tue, 14 Aug 2001, Franz J. Nahrada wrote:
Dabei ist mir auch ein gutes Beispiel für "free
hardware design" untergekommen....zur Abwechslung
ein Möbel.

You can find many similar things referred to in a book
(not on the web as far as I know) - 'Design for the Real
World', by Victor Papanek. He was creating patent free designs
for furniture and machinery from the 60s on. Unfortunately one
problem is they can only be patent-free, which makes it hard
to stop people patenting minor variations on them later. There
is no equivalent of the gpl for patented designs or registered
designs (of course there could be, it is simply a question of
money :-(

One idea I have about this is that for a more comlex object, 
e.g. an electric device, you need a construction paper in order 
to build it. This construction paper would fall under copyright, 
and could be open content. To reverse engeneer or to reimplement 
the design would still be possible, but maybe as difficult as 
with software.

Designs derived from it would not be patentable, because parts 
of the construction paper would have to be copied into the 
patent documentation, and that would be copyright infringement.

However, IANAL, so maybe this idea does not work...

Bye,
Thomas
 }:o{#
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