Control of SolidWorks World Presentations

Well, sometimes things change in ways you don’t expect. Yesterday I was getting emails from SW Corp requesting that I remove the links to the SWW presentations from my blog. Frankly, I kept fearing that the next email was going to come from an attourney. Today, after seeing the results of the poll, I wrote another scathing blog post, and before hitting the “Publish” button, I decided to give Greg Jankowski a call. I had tried to call him 2-3 times yesterday, but couldn’t get through.

To my surprise, Greg was completely reasonable. He started off by saying that they are going to move the SWW presentation content to a place outside of the SWW login, and even outside of the subscription login. I’m glad that SW has decided to do this, because they will do it in a much more professional and attractive way than the hack job that I have done.

My hat is off to Greg and anyone else at SW that was part of this decision. They have averted what might have become a public relations train wreck.

I’ll post back here when I get the official link to the material on the SW website. Score one for the SolidWorks Community!

(If you are interested, below is the post that was ready to go up.)

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Being an author who gets paid when people buy my stuff, I’m very concerned about copyright issues. I’ve written stuff that is sold commercially, and  stuff that is in the public domain. A commercial organization trying to hijack public domain data and make it proprietary makes me angry.

While the details of the poll seem to be changing hourly, the overall message is about steady. At the current time, there are 52 responses, with 28 (62%) saying that SolidWorks does not own, and should not control the presentation data. 17 (33%) say they should control the data. I know a lot of SW employees read this blog, for good or ill, but I don’t know how many have answered the poll. You can decide for yourself which way SW employees would skew the results.

What surprises me most is that 8% said that SW owns the data. I put that option in there as a wild exaggeration, a completely untenable solution. In my view, SolidWorks has no possible claim of ownership on presentation data.

I accept that a significant number of people think that because SW organizes the event, they should have control over the data, whether they can be said to actually own it or not. This is a reasonable argument, but I think it has enough flaws that it isn’t the one I chose.

If you notice, several presenters prefer not to submit their presentations. This may be because of the very conflict of copyright claims that we are running into here. So, if SW controls all World presentations, what about the ones that are not submitted? Do they control the presentations simply because they were submitted or do they control them because they control the event, whether they were submitted or not? If SW controls presentations whether they are submitted or not, well, that’s silly and completely unenforcible.

Also, several people who did submit presentations have also made them available separately. Does this mean that people who share their own data with others are in violation of SW’s claim? This too is silly.

At the end of the day, SolidWorks Corporation is trying to establish a monopoly on quality information, even if they didn’t create it. The upshot is of course that you will have to go to them and spend money in order to get quality information. The people keeping the lid on this data are the very ones responsible for the “SolidWorks Community”. The word “community” to me implies a grass-roots sharing among peers, not an elitist bully.

Which one did I vote for? I voted for the “content belongs to the creators” option. I also think that SW World presentations should be used with something like the GNU license agreement, which basically states common sense. You should give credit where credit is due. Like public domain except that you have to give credit to the authors.

SolidWorks has a Terms Of Use notice on their page:

Unless otherwise specified, you may view and download the materials at this Website only for your personal, informational, and noncommercial purposes, provided that you retain all copyright and other proprietary notices contained in the original materials on any copies of the materials. You may not modify the materials at this Website in any way or reproduce or publicly display, perform, post, transmit, distribute or otherwise use them for any public or commercial purpose.

This implies that you cannot download a presentation and show it at your user group meeting, which is so ridiculous that it is completely against the spirit and stated goals of the “SolidWorks Community”, as well as being again entirely unenforcible. The only thing I have violated by posting these presentations to my blog is the “personal” use, but I’m simply making it available for other people’s personal use.

So, if the SolidWorks Community people want to start suing user groups and user group leaders and a certain SWUGN rep for re-using or distributing SolidWorks World presentations to the SolidWorks Community, it would be one of the dumbest PR moves imaginable.

This conflict is a repeat of last year, when I posted a way to figure out my user name and password to get to the presentations for SWW07. I hope to offer presenters at SWW09 the option to submit presentations to me, instead of or in addition to SW, to make them available to the general public who didn’t get the opportunity to attend SWW.