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]
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.
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.