DiDIY Work Package 6: Exploring the impact of DiDIY on laws, rights and responsibilities

This WP will study the rights and responsibilities that users and producers of DiDIY technologies have and how current legislation affects them and vice versa.

• to investigate and provide a permanent reference about the main legal issues associated with the social diffusion of DiDIY;
• to investigate the ethical implications of DiDIY on rights and responsibilities;
• to investigate the creative design implications of DiDIY on rights and responsibilities;
• to assure the dissemination of the Project results under free licenses and open standard formats, and its raw data as Open Data.

For the first objective, this WP will review the dominant legal challenges and the solutions found in the cases studied in the project. This will in particular include the areas of copyright, patents and trademarks. On the one hand we expect to encounter  Free/Open Hardware projects. Most of them have adopted copyright based Free/Open Hardware licenses, in some cases trademarks are used for protection of the commons as well. On the other hand we will see DiDiY in proprietary/closed hardware projects, where the challenges are expected to have major impact in the sustainability and further development of community practices.

For the second objective this WP will formulate a set of policies for the consortium with respect to the development and publication of results of the project. The Consortium considers – in line with various guidelines and recommendations of the Commission – that the results should be equally accessible by all European citizens and organisations. Therefore the DiDiY's work will be published under free/open licenses and its raw data as Open Data, conforming to the EU directive on reuse of PSI information (Directive 2003/98/EC), thus facilitating the reuse and distribution by any interested party.

For the third objective, this WP will develop a set of internal guidelines for effective collaboration, respecting a diverse group of participants with a range of different computer software and practices. Therefore open standard formats would be encouraged as to ensure the diversity of applications used.

For the last objective, we will develop and apply a policy to provide the project's results in such way that these are equally accessible and reusable by  all European citizens and organisations. The policy will assure the use of free licenses for the project's results, encourage the use of open standards and protect people's privacy.