Summary: Have you ever scratched your head when it came to Open Hardware licenses? I know I have. Well it should be no surprise that we are not the only ones wondering what the real deal is. What I really want is for someone to sum up all the licenses out there and tell me which one is most appropriate for my project (you know, the one that I haven't built yet...come on, give me a break here!) This weeks guest, Eli Greenbaum, is a lawyer who has done a great job outlining the currently available Open Hardware licenses and also developed the Three-Dimensional Printing Open License in a paper that published in the Journal of Intellectual Property and Entertainment Law (JIPEL). In this weeks show, Eli talks about how hardware is "born" open to begin with, how copyright covers written things and not objects, what licenses apply to and how NOT everything in Open Hardware is black and white. Listen to the show and get answers to the questions that have been burning in your brain. Here are link to current Open Hardware Licenses: CERN 1.2 (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire) TAPR Open Hardware License (Tucson Amateur Packet Radio) Here is the paper that Eli wrote - a great read: Three-Dimensional Printing and Open Source Hardware P.S. Recently at the Open Hardware Summit, in Boston, Michael Weinberg, a lawyer with Public Knowledge (a digital advocacy group in Washington, DC) dedicated an entire talk to Open Hardware licensing - he pointed out (and our guest this week echos), the fact that licenses for Open Hardware actually add restrictions to end users.
