"The Open Product License (openproduct.cc) offers a license platform to help designers share and collaborate on product designs which are not intended for commercial exploitation, using a simple registry to link real products to online documentation".There are two types of licence:
"The Open Product License comes in two basic flavours: Public Domain or Non-commercial ShareAlike Attribution. In the first case, anyone can do anything with your design. In the second case, the use of your design must be non-commercial, attributed to you and available to share alike".What can licensees expect to do under an Open Product licence?
"... users can produce designs and add data tags that link to the online product info. You can modify the design and upload your versions too. Remix designs to add your own ideas and share the finished product with the community".There's not a great deal of information about the folk behind Open Product. The website says:
"We’re based at the Ravensbourne Incubator Programme in Greenwich. Drop in for a conversation about Open Product".From the .cc top level domain, one might infer that Open Product was based in a place called Greenwich in the Cocos Islands which, being an Australian territory, might opt for the English spelling of 'programme' over the American one. Further investigation leads however to Greenwich, London. Details of the Ravensbourne Incubator can be found here.
This blogger would dearly like to hear from anyone who is either offering or taking an Open Product licence. In light of a recent controversy as to whether Creative Commons is a suitable vehicle for the monetarisation of copyright works (here and here), it will be good to see how designers get from non-commercial licensing to a situation in which they can pay to put a scrap of food on their plates.
Well I followed the link provided to Ravensbourne and can only see a reference to a European Funded project that makes no mention of open product licenses. Any further clues - what did I miss?
ReplyDeleteI wonder whether in context of Ravensbourne, whether open product is for students during their study to collaborate with each other and improve product designs, rather than anything intended for commercial designers?
Or potentially, for brands to use to support 'crowd sourcing' or open innovation activities gaining input and feedback from product users - perhaps some of them designers with nothing better to do or with a sense of challenge for the fun of it.
Creative Commons has many times been declared by commercial designers as unsuitable to their needs - their prerogative to choose.
CC might work for some who aim for fame or whose software needs users and upgrades are where money is earned - but it is not, by and large, for those who wish to earn royalties, licensing and so forth from their creative works.
And whilst 6 different licenses are available with various rights applied, the main thrust of CC has always been open-source and therefore makes it difficult for the lay person to know the difference between the licenses and the rules.
If you can shed more light on the open product license that would be useful.
Many thanks