[hackerspaces] Idea: things.hackerspaces.org now that Thingiverse is not ok anymore

[Walter van Holst]

On 2012-09-23 22:08, Sparr wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 23, 2012 at 4:02 PM, Walter van Holst 
> <walter at revspace.nl> wrote:
>> - Ask your lawyer why this particular subject needs to be covered to 
>> begin
>> with since the license options all grant Makerbot Industries the 
>> rights to
>> use, transmit etc. already.
>
> This one is easy. People upload CC-BY-SA and CC-BY-NC content to
> Thingiverse.com, but Thingiverse.com, in whole, is not CC licensed.
> They need permission outside of the CC license to distribute that
> content as part of their site.

Uhm, this usually is worked around by stating that all content, unless 
indicated otherwise, is under license XYZ while displaying the deviating 
licenses in for content that does not conform to license XYZ. It is not 
like a website is treated as a monolithic piece of content in the eye of 
the law.

So really, I don't see a reason to include this, other than the "better 
safe than sorry thinking" that is prevalent among lawyers and tends to 
blow up in your face in situations in which reciprocity is key, like in 
communities.

Mind you, there are still good reasons possible for contribution 
license agreements with wider permissions than the core license. For 
example the Apache Foundation usually works with copyright assignments, 
which is about the widest you can get for software, but publishes under 
Apache Public Licens 2.0 itself. That is because Apache Foundation is 
designed to shield open source developers from patent and copyright 
trolls by utilising Apache Foundation as a legal firewall. So I am not 
fundamentally opposed to figures like that, but not without explanation. 
And it is the lack of explanation so far that is causing a loss of 
trust.

Regards,

  Walter