This post originally appeared on the Shapeways blog.

This post originally appeared on the Shapeways blog.

Last week Sparkfun ran a piece on their blog called “FaKey Makey” taking a deep dive into what appears to be an unauthorized derivative of the popular MaKey MaKey hardware accessory.  Briefly - and I commend the entire thing to you - it concludes that a product called the MC2 Circuit Beats manufactured by MGA Entertainment is a derivative of the MaKey MaKey that fails to give MaKey MaKey credit as the source of the idea.  

Let’s start this post with a lawyerly caveat. Everything on this site is my own personal opinion and should not be attributed to my employer or anyone else.   While that’s always true, this post is super thinking-in-progress-y so it seemed wise to repeat that.  Plus I’m not even a pretend product liability lawyer so keep that in mind.

This post is mostly a reaction to Adam Thierer’s recent article titled “A Section 230 for the ‘Makers Movement,” although in the grand tradition of reaction pieces it also uses the article as an excuse to write about a few things I’ve been thinking about lately.  It will probably make a bit more sense (or at least be easier to point out what I’m missing) if you read his piece first, although I’ll do my best to summarize it along the way.