Hi John, I totally agree and we are inline with the mission of protecting open source projects and helping design owners maintain copyright ownership. We are even exploring avenues to work with industry leaders and lawyers to develop new open source licenses for open hardware to help protect the projects completely.

I am sorry for this language in our terms and policies, which shouldn't have been there in first place. We adapted the terms of Heroku's Terms of Service which are maintained under CC license, as engineers we were more focused on product features initially. I will get it fixed and make sure they designs stay the property of the owners and owners maintain copyright ownership, and they have explicit discretion of licensing it the way they want.

Thank you for being responsive! That said, the language quoted by the parent doesn't appear to grant "ownership" as the parent implies, unless I'm missing something? Still, it'd be nice to have it clearly stated.

Secondly, do you know if there is a place for founders to find ToS like these? Or do you just copy them from providers with CC licenses? A while back there was a project with lawyers annotating legal licenses in a wiki/git that was a great idea.

Agreed and yes its good to state it more clearly.

I wasn’t able to find any best resources of ToS. The best option was adapting these ToS covered under CC licenses.

The project would have been great. Because this one of the biggest struggle initially.

It’s valuable when fellow HN users highlight questionable details buried in User Agreements (UA). Thank you!

It would be great to hear a response from the founder on this point.

Does Github’s UA have the same requirement for all of their users software?

I agree with what John said and I have responded to his comment. These kind of terms should definitely be highlighted. I apologize that we adapted this term in our User Agreement and it was a mistake. I will make sure we fix it. I would also like to assure that we will be careful in future regarding these kind of terms so we fulfill the mission of empowering open-hardware truly.

Best, Usama - Founder of InventHub

The key point here is that those terms apply to both private and public repositories. So if you use this service, they can distribute your private designs if they so choose.

Copyright isn't an issue for hardware designs because copyright does not cover functional devices. When the PC boards of clones of your product start coming out of China, InventHub is in the clear with those terms. To be taken seriously, InventHub has to take on the obligation of protecting your trade secrets.

Thank you for highlighting this. We are working to improve the language of the terms to make sure we help protect the the designs/trade secrets.

Just to put it out as a company this is how we see the obligation to protect trade secrets.

For public projects: We are giving user leverage to share at their own discretion along with a license made by them, industry standards or the new licenses we are coming up with.

For private projects: No designs will be listed publicly, shared with anyone, they exist in complete privacy to the user who created the repository. We do not and will not list them, rank them, read them or share them in any way.

To summarize if a user makes the project public, that means user is doing that on his own will and we will fulfill the obligation by enabling them with proper licensing tools + providing better licenses which InventHub is working on. For private projects everything will be safe and secret with the project owner and doesn't need protection more than platform infrastructure security which we take very seriously considering a lot of IP's will be hosted on our platform.

But you don't commit to that contractually. "How you see it as a company" is a worthless promise.

I don't think these people get being a B2B company at all. They think they can get away with "we can do anything" consumer type terms. If you consider dealing with this company for non-toy projects, you need to have a lawyer review the contract. That's all I'm going to say.

(My public designs are on GitHub. Works fine. You don't really need these people for open source work.)

Thanks Animats. Being part of the industry I understand the importance of these policies and how much it can hurt a developer. We are working hard to improve the terms and bring more clarity in them. I would love to chat with you to get your suggestions/feedback.

Currently we are closely following GitHub's terms(adapted under CC license).

"We need the legal right to do things like host Your Content, publish it, and share it. You grant us and our legal successors the right to store, parse, and display Your Content, and make incidental copies as necessary to render the Website and provide the Service. This includes the right to do things like copy it to our database and make backups; show it to you and other users; parse it into a search index or otherwise analyze it on our servers; share it with other users; and perform it, in case Your Content is something like music or video."[0]

[0]https://help.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-terms-o...

Also, we will definitely commit to what I said we believe as company in our terms of service. As I have said we are in process to update them with more clarity.