What are creative commons licenses worth if large companies simply choose to ignore them?
With a creative commons license a creator can indicate they want their work to be shared and used around the world, but exclude permission to make money out of their work. A creative commons license can also be used for other purposes, but this creative common license, Attribution-NonCommercial, is probably the most important one and the one I’m writing about now.
Sharing a design non-commercial
Together with some friends we made an iPad stand when there was just the one single original iPad and no stand at all. We were the first, the handmade iPad stand born out of personal necessity. We thought other people might want an iPad stand too, so let’s publish our tutorial on how to make this iPad stand on instructables.com. We published the tutorial with an attribution-noncommercial creative commons license so everyone can make their own iPad stand, but companies couldn’t just grab our design and sell ‘our’ iPad stand. We thought that was fair. 400,000 views later I think it struck a chord. It’s only a hand made wooden iPad stand, we assumed most people could just make one on their own. Apparently lots of people didn’t want to make their own iPad stand, but just buy it from us. So we made and sold lots of hand made wooden iPad stands. Very quickly we moved production to a local sheltered workshop which brought in lots of joy for the people working there. They loved stamping the iPad stand the most by the way.
IKEA and Action ignoring the creative commons license
After a few years of selling iPad stands and the iPad gaining market share, IKEA apparently wanted in on the action and started selling an IKEA wooden iPad stand. With the same design as ours. With the same bamboo wood as ours. Just the same. Granted, IKEA did do a bit more sanding and for some unfathomable reason made an extra cutout for a device that you can’t use (maybe just to be different from ours?). Another few years and Actions stores started selling the same design. IKEA didn’t contact us, Action stores didn’t contact us. They just took our creative commons licensed non commercial design and sold it commercially. Probably sold lots of them and presumably made lots of money doing so.
Now it’s only a piece of wood made in the right size with an angled slot for a tablet, but it’s about the principle. Can big companies just do this? Is it stealing? Or just smart enough different enough to make it legal? Or can big companies just ignore a creative commons license?
IKEAs response
Of course we let IKEA know that their wooden iPad stand is very similar to our wooden iPad stand. You know what IKEA said? You can probably guess… “Our wooden iPad stand is way different than yours, so case closed”.
It would cost us at least €60k just to argue this (in case you’re wondering, we certainly don’t have €60k or made anywhere near that kind of money with our wooden iPad stands)
Let’s hear your thoughts… where to go from here?
