ITead's OpenPCB Service - An alarming report

[Jon Chandler]

I am an extremely satisfied customer of ITead Studio's incredibly low cost PCB service, and I'm intrigued by their OpenPCB deal - if you order 10 boards at the normal price, for additional 10 cents you can get two additional boards...of someone else's design.  A dime isn't much risk, and you may get something interesting and useful.

It is my understanding that you'd have to agree to be a participant in the deal to allow your boards to be shared with someone else.

So I was a bit shocked just now to find  this comment. 

I received one of your PCB Design Demo Boards via the ITead Studio OpenPCB service. Nice! :-D

Someone was happy that they received one of my demo PCB boards as part of the OpenPCB deal.  The shocking part is that these boards were ordered and delivered before the OpenPCB service was announced, and I didn't agree to be part of the OpenPCB project!  I did not give permission to share my board with anybody.

Admittedly, the board is marked with a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license, but I don't think that gives the fab house any right to give it away.  I'm not too happy about this and it raises concerns about having boards made by ITead that I may not want others to have.

[ejeffrey]

Admittedly, the board is marked with a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license, but I don't think that gives the fab house any right to give it away.

Why not?  Is you concern that this doesn't count as "non-commerical" use, or would you feel the same way if it were public domain / CC0 / CC-BY-SA licensed such that commercial use was allowed?

[deephaven]

I would be very concerned if one of my commercial boards got delivered to someone else due to the fact that my boards are subject to an exclusivity arrangement between myself and my clients.

I assume you have emailed ITead about this, so it will be interesting to seetheir response.

[Jon Chandler]

Why not?  Is you concern that this doesn't count as "non-commerical" use, or would you feel the same way if it were public domain / CC0 / CC-BY-SA licensed such that commercial use was allowed?

It shouldn't be the fab house's decision to distribute my board without my permission no matter how it's marked or licensed.  I didn't agree to be a part of their OpenPCB service.    It's more an issue to me of how my intellectual property was handled.  Even if I have a stack of boards with a CC license, it's up to me when or if I actually release them to the public.

[ivan747]

This is specially a killer for simple but clever projects. When you discover what the circuit does is super easy to reimplement that in other ways.

[ejeffrey]

It shouldn't be the fab house's decision to distribute my board without my permission no matter how it's marked or licensed.  I didn't agree to be a part of their OpenPCB service.    It's more an issue to me of how my intellectual property was handled.  Even if I have a stack of boards with a CC license, it's up to me when or if I actually release them to the public.

I guess that it depends on whether sending them the gerbers with the license attribution constitutes 'distributing' it to them.  I wouldn't send design files anywhere with a license indication I didn't intend to abide by, but I can see your point.  Unless there was a separate indication that you were releasing the board under that license (like you were participating in a pooling service specifically restricted for open hardware use) they shouldn't be interpreting the markings on the board as an authorization to redistribute them.  I was thinking only that if they could just as easily have downloaded the gerbers from your website and produced the boards to give away, I don't see a difference that they happen to have manufactured the boards already.

[Alexx]

@Jon Chandler

We have received your mail, and now we are investigating why your board will be sent out -  We just keep the boards which both choose the OPEN PCB service in order, or all 10 boards will all be shipped out to client, also we will not keep your gerber for more than 2 week.

I have reply you and you can help us find why this issue happen.

Now we have shipped out about 80 types OPEN PCBs and you are the only one now we meet who didn't give the promises but the design be resent to others. We will find out the reason and it will help to prevent this kind of thing happening again.

Regards
Alex

[Jon Chandler]

Alex has investigated what happened and I believe it was an honest, well-intentioned mistake.  Here is his reply to me:

Thanks for your reply and sincerely apologize for this incident.
 
As I show the gerber and image that you sent me to our mail order partment, they confrim that they did ship out 3-4 this boards as an OPEN PCB.
 
So first I contact the production sector for why we have these boards , and the reply is : because when they send the gerber of order 1417 to factory for prototyping, the factory didn't test any of them because they said there is not any circuit net on it, so we get the 10 boards without e-tested, but we should ship out 5 tested and 5 un-tested to you , so they immediatly remade this order again and tell the factory make sure 50% e-test. So , after shipped out the order1417 there still the same 10 untested boards in our hand.
 
Next, I try to find out why they mixed with those OPEN PCBs. Finially I find that someone get these 10 demo boards and he though that it's interesting, it's a good demo to show our PCB technology of most components, and he saw there is BY-NC-SA licens and your E-mail on board, so he put these boards as an opensource without your consent - apologize for this again, we will make more clear terms to ensure that such non-standard operation will not happen again. Now I have told them to find out and destroy the rest boards, they will not be shipped as open PCB again.
 
It's really our fault that keep and ship these boards without your permission, we should apologize for it.  We will modify the more stringent operating rules, and to ensure that such incidents do not happen again. 
 
Regards
Alex   
 

I have asked Alex not to destroy the boards and to put the remainder in the OpenPCB program.  Furthermore, ITead has my permission to sell these boards on its web site.

Thank you Alex for investigating this, the prompt reply and taking measures to ensure that boards are not improperly made available to others.

[EEVblog]

Admittedly, the board is marked with a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license, but I don't think that gives the fab house any right to give it away.  I'm not too happy about this and it raises concerns about having boards made by ITead that I may not want others to have.

I can understand your shock and disappointment in this.
I think technically they may have had every right to do that, but NOT until you have actually released the board publicly (which I doubt they checked, but beside the point).
If you have released it publicly then they have every right to distribute the board.
But up until that point, you still payed them for a private service, which are always deemed to be commercial-in-confidence. In which case they should have kept your files private.

They probably just made an enthusiastic mistake because of the CC mark.

Dave.