Re: [DIYbio] DIY Science Equipment contest

Tekla labs consists primarily of a bunch of UC Berkeley grad students, graduates and postdocs. They're local here, and I can vouch for them. They're Good People. No nefarious plans to take over the market in DIY hardware. :-D.

They've been around a few years, and have run another contest like this last year, focusing primarily on 3D printed designs:
http://www.teklalabs.org/3dprinting/
http://www.teklalabs.org/print-my-lab-results/

There's plenty of information about who they are and what values they hold on their website:

http://www.teklalabs.org/faqs/

Who is Tekla Labs?

Tekla Labs is operated by researchers at the University of California Berkeley and University of California San Francisco.

We are an open community of scientists, nurses, writers, engineers, researchers, and lay persons interested in quality, self-made laboratory equipment.

In what licensing format is access to DIY documents provided by the Tekla Labs Community ?

All DIY documents provided by Tekla Labs are open-source and published the Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0) Creative Commons License.

However, there are many different models for licensing, including newer models that are being designed specifically with hardware in mind. We appreciate that our community members have different thoughts on how to best share their designs and we are working on a more flexible system to allow for several sharing options, including completely open sharing. Based on feedback we've had, we are really excited to include also the option for allowing commercial use of the designs to enable effective distribution at universities in low-resource settings globally.  If you have feedback on what options you would like to see, please contact us.

If you already now wish to submit a design under a different license than the Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0) Creative Commons License, please feel free to contact us to propose an alternative license for your design.

The Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0) Creative Commons License allows you to copy, redistribute and modify the DIY designs, as long as you follow the license rules: 1) you must appropriately credit Tekla Labs and the creator of the design, 2) it is for non-commercial uses and 3) if you alter or build on the design, you may only distribute under this same license or a similar license. Please see the creative commons webpage for the specific wording and for additional considerations and limitations of this license.

All contributors must agree to distributing their work under this creative commons license.  All users must also follow this license when building, modifying and redistributing any designs.

The CC BY-SA license requirement is specific to the designs they publish through their own website. I don't see anything requiring people to use that one for the Instructables contest. And in fact, the Instructables website allows you to attach any of the CC license models you'd like to your own instructable.

The long official set of rules on the Instructables contest page is mainly Instructables boilerplate, nothing to do with Tekla Labs directly. They do send out valuable prizes to instructables writers around the world on a regular basis, so they've had to put some pretty solid legalese in place to cover their collective asses. Compare with their ongoing Kite Contest, for example:

http://www.instructables.com/contest/buildmylab/?show=RULES
http://www.instructables.com/contest/kite2013/?show=RULES

And yes, they do say that publishing your design may affect your rights to patent things later. Well duh - that is basic patent law. They do *not* claim any rights over your designs, as far as I can tell.

(The Instructables website does claim some copyrights over the content you post, "but solely in connection with the Service and/or our business activities (such as, without limitation, for promoting and marketing the Service) and/or to comply with legal or technical requirements". But again, that's boilerplate you'll find on pretty much any website where you post content - otherwise they wouldn't even be allowed to display your content on their site. Again, this part has nothing to do with Tekla Labs directly.)

Patrik