IP Enforcement

I’ve never found myself in the position of having to enforce my own IP this way, but I guess that now I do. See, earlier today I came across this post on Matrixsynth about someone selling a SID 6581-based synth on eBay (this auction) . Looking more closely at it, it has one of my MIDIbox SID-NUXX Mainboard PCBs in it.

The licensing for this board is Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5, so it can’t be resold. (This was mostly because I used a non-profit version of some software for it and thusly have a responsibility to ensure that it isn’t used for for-profit work.)

I’ve messaged the seller with this:

Hey there... This is Steve, the guy who designed the MIDIbox SID-NUXX board used in there. I'm not sure if we've talked before about your implementation of the board, but I wanted to tell you that the license of that board specifically forbids commercial sale of the design. This is licensed this way because of the non-profit license used for the software with which I designed the PCB.

I'd like to sort this out without disputing the auction via eBay, so please contact me directly at c0nsumer@nuxx.net. Thank you.

-Steve

I’ve also emailed the person who runs Matrixsynth to see if they know the identity of the seller. I also made this post on the MIDIbox forums.

There are a few people who I sent MIDIbox SID-NUXX PCBs to for free. I’m wondering if this is one of those guys… If so, it’s kinda dickish of him to sell off something he was given. If he is someone who had a run of PCBs made himself, he’s most definitely violating the license under which I released the boards.

(None of this above even touches on the reselling of the software contained on there, which TK, the guy who writes all the MIDIbox stuff, generally forbids.)