cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/47449079
I stumbled across this link in the comment of another post, and thought it was super promising!
Someone mentioned something about in the US, this would be illegal due to DRM laws - not sure about the specifics of this, but regardless an open source printer seems like something we’ve needed for ages, as printers are something that always seem like way more of a headache then they need to be. It seems like such a simple technology that has existed for quite some time, but they are always such a pain to deal with. (Maybe it’s just my bad luck with printers?)
I saw a maker the other day that released his plans on his project with a non-commercial license. He later found it was being sold on Amazon. He contacted an attorney friend of his, the attorneys said that the maker licensees are only truly effective on art.
If it’s a physical functional product, you have very little in the way of legal protection from a creative common license, which kind of sucks because the proper legal method would then be patent, but that puts us in the same scenario that you can’t copy it for a non-profit.
I mean with the right legal set-up you could make it work. Make a foundation that releases it under a non-profit license and holds the patent. It could allow for selling derivatives without major profit margins but it’d be difficult to set up.