Piracy in woodworking?

[Chris Oakley]

I just got my Jan. issue to Wired magazine. They have a "jargon watch" about new words. One word is "Tool piracy." It says, 'Coined by tool supplier Stots to describe the illegal sharing of woodworking jig templates. Stots sells a template with a license agreemet to it." I guess I didn't know this was a problem. I can see if someone is copying the design of a jig then passing it off as their own, but what's different about borrowing a tapering jig as opposed to borrowing a router?

[Jim Becker]

The Stotts situation is a bit unique in that their product lets you produce custom dovetail templates. They sell it with a "usage license" that restricts you to producing templates only for yourself...this precludes a group of folks sharing one Stotts product to produce a bunch of dovetail templates for everyone involved. Given the uniqueness of the product, it's not all that an unreasonable situation, but one that is difficult for most people to understand or accept. What you are buying from Stotts, in effect, is not the product, but only the right to use it in a predetermined manner. But too many of these "shrink-wrap licenses" go into things that are way beyond reasonable and folks are wary of them--you may even have software on your computer that you "agreed" to the terms of a license when you installed them that gives someone else the right to monitor everything you do on the machines and forbids you to remove or turn off that feature! (I personally don't like overly restrictive licenses on anything although appreciate the battle against piracy and intellectual or creative property)

I don't know of any other woodworking related thing like this, although software application used for woodworking certainly have restrictions and license terms that protect the vendor's

[Mike Cutler]

Chris. I know this subject has been touched upon before. As a person who owns a Stots Dovetail Template Master I can respect his copyrights and patents, and would never mass produce the template for sale or free. The original template however, is mine and I do believe it is within my rights to give it away or sell it as used or simply throw it away if I so desire. This issue has been compared alot to software piracy and people stand on both sides of the issue. The actual device itself is really simple in design and seems to work OK. It really doesn't cost very much, mine was 20 bucks in a discontinued stock bin a few years ago.