A personal view by David Gibson
Many individuals in CREG and the UK rescue groups have contributed to the on-line information about the HeyPhone Cave Rescue Communication System. Information on how to build a HeyPhone can be downloaded from the HeyPhone site.
Originally, the CREG committee announced that it had been their intention to place the design "in the public domain" so that it was "available for all cavers". But this statement is vague, and the best legal interpretation would seem to be that all the contributors to the project have waived their copyright in the documentation. If this were truly the case then anybody could freely download the information and put it to whatever use they wanted.
However, the CREG committee later removed the "public-domain" statement and replaced it by one saying "a key element of the project is to publish the design, subject to the condition that the information will not be used for profit." Unfortunately, that statement has no legal validity.
I guess that the committee's intention was really to say "A key element of the project has been to publish the design, but we stipulate that the published information must not be used for profit". That at least makes sense, even though it is not legally enforceable.
There is no provision, in law, to support the above "not used for profit" stipulation. Copyright, for example, is merely a protection against the copying of the documentation. (Patent and Design Rights are not applicable in this case). In any case, the phrase "used for profit" is too vague. None of the information on the HeyPhone site is accompanied by any copyright statement and, although this is not required in English Law, it certainly helps if the owner of the copyright is mentioned in the documentation! As things stand, one might assume that copyright had been waived, as CREG's original "public domain" statement implied.
Of course, to be practical, it is unlikely that anyone is going to make sufficient profit out of the information to worry CREG, since induction radios are fairly specialised pieces of equipment with a limited use. But - given that a statement on intended use has been made - one could suppose that it ought, at least, to be phrased in less ambiguous terms.
David Gibson, 14-mar-2004