This post originally appeared on the OSHWA blog .

I recently found myself reading Mark Lemley’s paper The Benefit of the Bargain while also helping a friend put together the Terms of Service (ToS) for their new startup. Lemley’s paper essentially argues that modern ToS - documents that are written by services to be one sided and essentially imposed on users as a take-it-or-leave-it offer - should no longer be enforced as contracts because they have lost important fairness elements of what make contracts contracts.

Earlier this summer the Engelberg Center released a new study on ebook ownership. The study was motivated by a superficially simple question: “why can’t you own an ebook?”.

The air quality in NYC has been . . . not great this summer. This presents and opportunity. Why settle for knowing that the air is not great in the city when you can know how not-great it is in your very own home?

Earlier this week PT over at Adafruit published an interesting post on the evolving relationship between some of the larger open source hardware companies and open source itself. The post catalogs various ways in which three marquee open source hardware companies - Arduino, Sparkfun, and Prusa - have explored non-open strategies for various parts of their offerings.