Including data sheets in the project documentation- a legal issue?

[homebrew]

Quite some OSHW projects include data sheets of components thy used in the design in their (git) repositories.
While I like that a lot, the question arises if that is even legal and could develop into a thread for the project.

Technically data sheets are NOT open source (i.e. never seen any DS with creative commons license). So therefore no rights for republication or distribution should be derivable. Some of the data sheets are further often marked as "Confidential" or "Prliminary".

So how to deal with that?

[Ian.M]

'Preliminary' doesn't change anything.

Best practice would be to seek written permission to mirror the datasheets in the project repository, and include a copy of that permission with an approved link to the original datasheet or product page.

[Rerouter]

i would think as long as the datasheet is accessible elsewhere with no restrictions, e.g. on the manufacturers web page, and you do not modify the document, you would fall under fair use, however if it is indeed confidential or worse, NDA specific, then they would need some form of agreement to make public, again generally to source a confidential or nda datasheet requires some agreement to not share it, and would fall to the penalty terms of the agreement,

[homebrew]

'Preliminary' doesn't change anything.

Best practice would be to seek written permission to mirror the datasheets in the project repository, and include a copy of that permission with an approved link to the original datasheet or product page.

Yes, that would be the best way for sure. But is that feasible? / Have you tried?

All the distributors do mirroring, too, but the manufactures need them and hence I assume it is easy for them to get such a permission. On the other hand for a small OSHW-Project it might just be too easy to say "no".

[Ian.M]

The other approach is instead of the datasheets themselves, to include a script to pull the datasheets from the manufacturer or distributor sites, as making a single copy for personal use is almost invariably permitted.

[wraper]

You should read a legal notice in particular datasheet. If there is no "confidential" mark, I guess it would be OK to include them in most cases.
For example from TI datasheet:

Reproduction of significant portions of TI information in TI data books or data sheets is permissible only if reproduction is without alteration
and is accompanied by all associated warranties, conditions, limitations, and notices. TI is not responsible or liable for such altered
documentation. Information of third parties may be subject to additional restrictions.

So seems you can reproduce Ti datasheets unless abuse it in some way. Like clone the device and use their datasheet with altering part of the text so it looks like your own.

[homebrew]

The other approach is instead of the datasheets themselves, to include a script to pull the datasheets from the manufacturer or distributor sites, as making a single copy for personal use is almost invariably permitted.

Yeah, that's an excellent idea! I'll go definitely that way. Circumvents just all the problems.

[Len]

The other approach is instead of the datasheets themselves, to include a script to pull the datasheets from the manufacturer or distributor sites, as making a single copy for personal use is almost invariably permitted.

The problem with that is the script will start failing over the next couple of years as the chip makers re-jig their web sites.

[homebrew]

The problem with that is the script will start failing over the next couple of years as the chip makers re-jig their web sites.

Yes sure but I will include that script into the build process, as I do a lot of code-generation (or better library generation) by scripts anyway. Hence it will be run on any checkout from the repository.

And as I already have scripts to create all of my component libraries (KiCAD environment), this should add nicely. But that's a topic for another thread :-)

[Ian.M]

Increase the odds of the datasheet still being found by the script N years later, by using multiple URLs for each datasheet, e.g. manufacturer + 3 major distributors.

[free_electron]

Publish the BOM. including full manufacturer part number and manufacturer.

anyone who wants datasheets can find em then.

[Ian.M]

When parts go obsolete, the full part number isn't always helpful for finding the datasheet when said datasheet covers multiple part numbers.  In addition, it would be useful to have the datasheet title and document number (if any).

[matseng]

It seems like the Internet Archive (Wayback Machine) have plenty of datasheets stored in their petabyte racks...
https://archive.org/details/MC1489

[station240]

Github (and others) have a way to publish binaries as "releases" the like. Publish the datasheets that way.
Another method is to make a separate project called project-documentation/datasheets with a different license.

[Lee Leduc]

I'm currently working on a Lab Exercises manual to accompany a text book and I'm researching this issue. I've talked talked to the TI lawyers about including data sheets and applications notes in my documentation. They referred me to this page on the TI website regarding copyright policy.

http://www.ti.com/corp/docs/legal/copyright.shtml?keyMatch=copyright%20permission&tisearch=Search-EN-Everything

Hope this helps.

[homebrew]

I'm currently working on a Lab Exercises manual to accompany a text book and I'm researching this issue. I've talked talked to the TI lawyers about including data sheets and applications notes in my documentation. They referred me to this page on the TI website regarding copyright policy.

http://www.ti.com/corp/docs/legal/copyright.shtml?keyMatch=copyright%20permission&tisearch=Search-EN-Everything

Hope this helps.

Yes, it basically says that you cannot even mirror their documents without consent. Hence yeah - exactly what I would have expected.