Money and Licensing, Part One

(Photo by furiousgeorge81)

I’ve been changing most (if not all of) my licenses from non-commercial to simple attribution on Thingiverse.  I’m doing this because I’ve changed my mind about what sort of designs I want to contribute to the community.

One of the awesome things about the Creative Commons is it makes it really easy to have an open design which still can bring its creator money.  If I design a part under a non-commercial license, and someone wants to make money off it, we can meet and arrange licensing fees for commercializing that product.  In the mean time, the license explicitly allows them to download it, play with it, and make their own versions to see if it needs tweaking to work in their application.  In doing so, they add value to the design, creating intellectual property which they in turn can release under non-commercial license, getting the same benefits I got from my design, and earning (upon three-party negotiations) both of us more money in licensing fees.

Non-commercial licenses, paradoxically, are a great way to make a business out of digital design.  (This all assumes everyone plays by the rules and is honest when making derivative works and so on, but I really think it can work.)

But presently, my motives for producing items on Thingiverse are very different from all that.  I’m making models as a form of charitable contribution.  I’m donating time because I want this community to be enriched.  I want to give shapes and designs and usable things to the group, and I want them to be able to sell them.

To me, for now, it makes sense to give my time to this community, because I’m getting to be involved in something exciting and new.  Every design which is open enough to download and print (non-commercial or not) increases the effective value of digital fabrication.  But every commercially-free design does even more.  Designs under simple attribution licenses give owners of digital fabrication technology a source of income.  They can print out and sell these things.  They can add on to these designs, make THOSE designs non-commercial, and then get royalties for their addition to my work without worrying about contacting or paying me.  Like in the story about teaching a person to fish, I’m excited by the prospect of doing the absolute maximum amount of good when I put out designs for now.

There’s actually an interesting point brought up by my sentiments here, having to do with the supply and demand of design, but I’ll go over that in another post.