topic Re: Attaching an enforceable Copyright statement in Fusion Design, Validate & Document Forum

Attaching an enforceable Copyright statement

Witsend3486 — Thu, 04 Feb 2016 18:58:55 GMT

Hello,

Question: In the opinion of Autodesk (or anyone else who feels qualified to speak), how might one attach a legally enforceable copyright statement to a Fusion 360 model? More generally, how does one protect intellectual property rights to CAD/CAM information in the cloud-based, CTRL+C/CTRL+V era?

Excess verbiage follows....

In the olden days we drew with ink on Mylar that had a copyright block in the printed border -- anything on that sheet of Mylar was considered protected. Any "blueprint" of that drawing carried the copyright statement right along with it. In the Fusion 360 world, would the A360 comments attached to a design be considered sufficiently inseparable from that project to be in an electronic "border" of the work? Since I do not immediately see a mechanism to delete an A360 comment, would such a comment be considered a "permanent" attachment?

Background: I am a retiree using Fusion 360 to pursue my retirement project/hobby/fantasy/delusion of building a 1/8 scale live steam locomotive from original Union Pacific drawings. The plan for many of the parts is to make 3-D printed lost wax castings. While I hope to make many of the smaller castings myself, there are clearly some that are beyond any capability of which I might ever conceive.

While many of the parts are relatively simple, some (see images below) are quite complex and have been the subject of hundreds of hours of study and design revision. (Toward the end of the steam era the Union Pacific did not build simple steam engines and seemed to have a distinct distaste for the enlightenment of the occasional isometric view.) I would like to assure that any commercial value that these designs might have in the live steam hobby industry (which is surprisingly large) ends up in my retired pocket and not someone else's.

To involve corporate foundries will necessitate sharing the Fusion 360 designs of these parts with them. (To share a bare .stl file would seem the antithesis of my intentions.) If I were a large corporation with the prospect of significant annual sales ahead, I'm sure a non-disclosure agreement would be easily obtained (or, perhaps, already in place after years of business together). But for a retiree that might order five or six more in the next decade or so, even getting a quote may be a challenge. The ease with which a cloud reference can end up in an email elsewhere gives the cautious (and old) soul pause.

It is also not clear to me that granting read-only access to a design will necessarily be adequate. A foundry will certainly want to scale a design to account for shrinkage and I imagine there will be a number of "tweaks" needed to change a design into a cast object. There may also be machine shops down the line for the larger parts and they may well want unfettered access to the design as well.

In the end I suppose I will just have to close my eyes and trust in personal ethics and the minute (in the scale of things) commercial value involved, but a legal fig leaf might still be of comfort.

Regards,

Bill

Re: Attaching an enforceable Copyright statement

schneik-adsk — Fri, 05 Feb 2016 16:47:38 GMT

You could include a specific creative commons license with all releases of your design.

https://creativecommons.org/choose/

a non commercial non derivative license would ensure others know the limits of the release of your data.

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Re: Attaching an enforceable Copyright statement

Oceanconcepts — Fri, 05 Feb 2016 19:42:29 GMT

Kevin, I think Bill raises an important question in relation to the sharing environment. If we wanted to attach a legal notice (not necessarily copyright) to a design we distribute through a public or private link, there isn’t now a clear place to do this- that I see, anyway. For instance, I must necessarily share files with our product licensee, but those represent our work. I do this through the “share Public Link” option. I’m required by our licensing agreement to provide specific notice when I share proprietary information. The ability to include this boilerplate notice with the shared link would be a benefit to me.

Is there something I’m overlooking? If not I think this might be worth considering as an option, alongside requiring a password.

Re: Attaching an enforceable Copyright statement

Witsend3486 — Fri, 05 Feb 2016 20:58:58 GMT

Ron, Kevin;

I think than Ron is striking home toward the core of my question: how might one make whatever notice -- copyright, licensee declaration, engineering limitations, manufacturing process specifications, or whatever else -- an inseparable part of the information package that a shared link takes one to? It would counter the down the line response of "Oh, we didn't know that applied to this design." By being an explicitly inseparable part of the shared overall information package it allows one to respond with "No. The engineering limitations document (or whatever) was an inseparable part of what we shared. You should have read it and conformed to its directions. That's why what you made broke."

This is why I wondered if an A360 comment associated with a "design" (as Fusion 360 defines it) was sufficiently inseparable and un-deletable to meet this need.

Regards,

Bill

Re: Attaching an enforceable Copyright statement

Oceanconcepts — Tue, 09 Feb 2016 06:09:05 GMT

OK, based on comments here I went ahead and wrote this up as an idea in the idea station. Feel free to go there and vote or add comments, and we can see if this is of general interest. I do think it’s something that needs to be addressed if Fusion is going to be used in a professional environment with an all digital workflow.

http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/ideastation-request-a-feature-or/include-option-for-rights-notice-when-sharing-digital-files-in/idi-p/6030422