Anybody here familiar with the law around Creative Commons. There is a ton of stuff out there that can even be used commercially but wants to be attributed. How do attribute a digital file over it’s moved to an analog medium? Thoughts? Concerns? Is hobby selling on the side even considered commercial use?
I want to make money from projects, but want to feel better ethically before selling anything with possible licensing issues.
just look at the license. If it says commercial usage is ok, then nothing to worry about. You can just engrave or a put a sticker on your final product on the bottom for attribution.
that being said I have seen a lot of CC abuse. Specifically the Open Builds CNC Machines. Companies sell upgrade kits and do not share any of the dxf files or design files as required under the attribution section.
There are a number of different Creative Commons licenses. If you want to sell commercially, make sure the licenses item doesn’t have a Non-Commercial (NC) restriction.
Non-Commercial is defined as “means not primarily intended for or directed towards commercial advantage or monetary compensation.” So I would say hobby selling is still commercial use, particularly if sold for money.
The attribution language isn’t that hard to comply with you can review it under Section 3(a) of any of the Attribution (BY) licenses. Simply attaching a tag with the require attribution details would be sufficient, nothing says the attribution has to be permanently affixed to the licensed material, just that the recipient is made aware of the attribution requirements.
As to the open builds CNC machines. I don’t see where any CC license requires the distribution of source material. I don’t think they have an obligation to distribute dxf files.
As always, I am not your lawyer and this isn’t legal advice, you should retain a lawyer if you have concerns.
To clarify, not all open builds machines. But the most popular one , work bee, was released under CC BY-SA 3.0, which has the share/share alike provision. Not sure about other designs.
Thanks for the replies. I had wondered about supplying some sort of additional info along with the product for attribution. My confusion stemmed around there not being any examples of attributing non-digital formats, except for books (if I’m remembering correctly). Books lend themselves to the same sort of attribution. I’m happy to provide attribution via one of these methods.
I haven’t sold anything off my maslow yet, so I’m not quite to the point of needing a lawyer. 
I just wanted to see what other people in the community were doing to try and comply.