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
