3DShare: Sharing an Open Source license for 3D Printed things and our ToS

from 3DShare: Sharing an Open Source license for 3D Printed things and our ToS

by Kim van der Sangen

At YouMagine we want to help people collaborate, remix and design together online. We want to build the tooling to make it easier for anyone to design, work together and share using 3D printing. We’re not alone on this, there are a lot of fellow travellers who are doing the same or similar things.

We’ve been thinking about how we can act as a force multiplier by helping our competitors and companies in the same field. If we can make things cheaper, easier or better for them the chance that one of us succeeds will be higher. The chance that we will collectively succeed in making things as supple as other data will be higher also. After all YouMagine wants to make the plumbing for 3D printing and make things as malleable as memes. We see our task as that of creating the necessary infrastructure on top of which others can build. And not in the sense of being a platform as Apple is a closed platform but rather a source of data, information and tooling for other people’s platforms and the community as a whole. We’re not a platform, but rather a foundation supporting other platforms not locking anyone in. Simultaneously we’ve been thinking about our community and how we can work together with them to create a better YouMagine. We’ve decided to let our community influence and guide all the major decisions and directions we take. So we want you to tell us where we need to go and what we should be doing. Feel free to at any time contact me with feedback, ideas, critiques etc.

Share3D
This is why we’re sharing our first major Share3D project with you. Share3D is a part of YouMagine that we will share with the “internet of things”, open hardware & 3D printing communities. It is a set of tools to help them accelerate their development. We looked at obstacles to a 3D printed world, costs that others would have to incur & problems other people were not solving. We decided that the most important first thing to make and share were in the legal realm. A lot of people overlook legal and its implications. When people do look into it they all individually have to spend a lot of time and money to understand all of the patent, copyright & liability implications and issues surrounding the sharing of things. We concluded that we would have the highest immediate impact on the community by ameliorating their risks and to give their users clarity about their rights. We’ve holistically looked at this issue from the point of the designer, the 3D printer operator, the platform and the end user. We have tried to come up with the clearest & most equitable guidelines for all. We’ve found this especially important because a lot of the people involved in the sharing of things are persons but may be faced with severe measures usually reserved for companies (eg infringement, product liability, wrongful death). Also a single tort case in the US for example would be enough to sink any one of the platforms in the Sharing of Things market. … (Read more)

Source: YouMagine.com

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