Assignment:
Individual
-Develop a plan for dissemination of your final project
- Prepare drafts of your summary slide (presentation.png, 1920x1080) and video clip (presentation.mp4, 1080p HTML5, < ~minute, < ~10 MB)and put them in your root directory
Accomplised
-Understood what licensing means
-Compared different type of license
-Licensed my project with a suitable license
What is Patent Licenses?
A patent grants its owner the right to exclude others from practicing the patented invention, and it does not give the patent owner the right to practice the patented invention. Licenses should be understood in this context.
Exclusive license: Under an exclusive license, a patent owner transfers all indicia of ownership to the licensee only retaining the title to the patent. From the point of view of the patent owner, he surrenders all rights under the patent (including the right to sue for infringement and the right to license) to the licensee. In essence, the licensee steps into the shoes of the patent owner and acquire the right to sub-license the patent and sue for patent infringement. However, the exclusivity can be limited by a field of use. That means that the licensee gets a promise from the patent owner that the patent will not be licensed to anyone else in a stipulated field of use.
Non-exclusive license: By granting a non-exclusive license, the patent owner essentially promises not to sue the licensee for patent infringement. Some people think that by acquiring a non-exclusive license the licensee acquires the freedom to operate in the space protected by the licensed patent, but this may or may not be the case. It depends on whether or not the licensee’s products infringe other patents.
Advantages of Patent Licensing
Not all inventors want to make or sell products or designs. Patent licensing lets you profit from the rights to your invention. You can collect royalties from sales.
-Limited Risk
-Global Distribution
-Limited Time Period
-Eliminating Patent Infringement
Disadvantages of Patent Licensing
-Soliciting Manufacturers
-Low Success Rate
Approaches to Patent Licensing
One analogy that can be helpful is to look at licensing approaches in two ways: "carrot" licensing and "stick" licensing.
Carrot: This is when the person you want to do business with is not practicing the patented invention. They do not have to take a license. You must convince them that your patent technology is better than what they are using. Show them how licensing your product or services will help them make money. It's all about how you market your invention.
Stick: This is when the person you want to work with is infringing your patent. They are already using your patent technology. In this case, you must threaten them with a court case. They will license your product — or else.
In reality, both situations involve the threat of a court case. In the carrot approach, an inevitable court case is just implied. In the stick approach, it is directly stated.
Final project:
My final project is a hologram device that can be used for communication, but the limitation of the hologram is not limited by that. As VR became a revolution when Google introduced VR cardboard, This type of Hologram has a wide variety of uses in the different field. So the type of license that I would choose would be Non-exclusive where I can share my ideas and design with someone, as long as they credit me for my work, and even seek the opportunity to collaborate with them in making the project better. With this in mind, I went through the types of licensing to choose one among them.
Types of Licensing
These are some of the types of open source licenses.
A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted work. A CC license is used when an author wants to give people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that they have created. CC provides an author flexibility (for example, they might choose to allow only non-commercial uses of their own work) and protects the people who use or redistribute an author's work from concerns of copyright infringement as long as they abide by the conditions that are specified in the license by which the author distributes the work.
The MIT License is a permissive free software license originating at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). As a permissive license, it puts only very limited restriction on reuse and has, therefore, an excellent license compatibility. The MIT license permits reuse within proprietary software provided that all copies of the licensed software include a copy of the MIT License terms and the copyright notice. The MIT license is also compatible with many copyleft licenses, such as the GNU General Public License (GPL); MIT licensed software can be integrated into GPL software, but not the other way around
The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or GPL) is a widely used free software license, which guarantees end users the freedom to run, study, share and modify the software. The license was originally written by Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) for the GNU Project, and grants the recipients of a computer program the rights of the Free Software Definition. The GPL is a copyleft license, which means that derivative work can only be distributed under the same license terms. This is in distinction to permissive free software licenses, of which the BSD licenses and the MIT License are widely used examples. GPL was the first copyleft license for general use.
GNU Lesser General Public License
The GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) is a free software license published by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The license allows developers and companies to use and integrate software released under the LGPL into their own (even proprietary) software without being required by the terms of a strong copyleft license to release the source code of their own components. The license only requires software under the LGPL be modifiable by end users via source code availability. For proprietary software, code under the LGPL is usually used in the form of a shared library, so that there is a clear separation between the proprietary and LGPL components. The LGPL is primarily used for software libraries, although it is also used by some stand-alone applications.
BSD licenses are a family of permissive free software licenses, imposing minimal restrictions on the use and redistribution of covered software. This is in contrast to copyleft licenses, which have reciprocity share-alike requirements. The original BSD license was used for its namesake, the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), a Unix-like operating system. The original version has since been revised and its descendants are more properly termed modified BSD licenses. The BSD license is a simple license that merely requires that all code be licensed under the BSD license if redistributed in source code format.
The Apache License is a permissive free software license written by the Apache Software Foundation (ASF).The Apache License, Version 2.0 requires preservation of the copyright notice and disclaimer. Like other free software licenses, the license allows the user of the software the freedom to use the software for any purpose, to distribute it, to modify it, and to distribute modified versions of the software, under the terms of the license, without concern for royalties. This makes ALv2 a FRAND-RF license. The ASF and its projects release the software they produce under the Apache License and many non-ASF projects are also using the ALv2.
MIT VS CC
After reading through the brief of each license, I decide to use either MIT or CC, as they are easy to understand and use. The MIT license is one of the shortest licenses of all the major recognized open source licenses. The full text is just 3 paragraphs long. So I went on to analyze them both and find the right one.
Creative Commons License
The Creative Commons copyright licenses and tools forge a balance inside the traditional “all rights reserved” setting that copyright law creates. Our tools give everyone from individual creators to large companies and institutions a simple, standardized way to grant copyright permissions to their creative work. The combination of our tools and our users is a vast and growing digital commons, a pool of content that can be copied, distributed, edited, remixed, and built upon, all within the boundaries of copyright law.
Three “Layers” Of Licenses
These are some of the advantages of choosing CC license
Legal code
Each license begins as a traditional legal tool, in the kind of language and text formats that most lawyers know and love. We call this the Legal Code layer of each license.
Human Readable
The Commons Deed (also known as the “human readable” version of the license)is a handy reference for licensors and licensees, summarizing and expressing some of the most important terms and conditions. Think of the Commons Deed as a user-friendly interface to the Legal Code beneath, although the Deed itself is not a license, and its contents are not part of the Legal Code itself.
Machine Readable
Machine-readable license design recognizes that software, from search engines to office productivity to music editing, plays an enormous role in the creation, copying, discovery, and distribution of works. In order to make it easy for the Web to know when a work is available under a Creative Commons license, "machine readable" version of the license is provided.
Types of licenses
Attribution (BY)
Licensees may copy, distribute, display and perform the work and make derivative works and remixes based on it only if they give the author or licensor the credits (attribution) in the manner specified by these.
Share-alike (SA)
Licensees may distribute derivative works only under a license identical ("not more restrictive") to the license that governs the original work. (See also copyleft.) Without share-alike, derivative works might be sublicensed with compatible but more restrictive license clauses, e.g. CC-BY to CC-BY-NC.)
Non-commercial (NC)
Licensees may copy, distribute, display, and perform the work and make derivative works and remixes based on it only for non-commercial purposes.
No Derivative Works (ND)
CAN:
-Commercial use
-Modification
-Distribution
-Sublicense
-Private Use
Cannot:
-Hold Liable
Must:
-Include copyright’
-Include License.
This summarizes the entire MIT license
Choosing the License
As I mentioned earlier the project has many possibilities. So I would like to choose a license that allows the user to modify, share and edit the design as long as he/she gives credit and does the same.
Most of the other license is great for open source projects, as they have very minimal restrictions and no modifications be done to them, while in CC license the user gets to choose certain sub-division within the license as per his/her requirement. Another major factor to use CC licenses for my purpose is that MIT and BSD license is used mostly for software licensing and CC is for Design.
So I used CC to license my project
The right type of License can be chosen with the help of a license picker.
Holo-Com by SS.Adhitya is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Possibilities to Probabilities
Possibilities:
The hologram produced is actually 2.5d and is not 3d. Yet the type of projection is new and is quite exciting for the viewer. The possibilities are endless with this idea.
-Used as learning tool to teach kids in an interactive way
-Used in video conferencing
-Used for games and gesture controlled activity
-As virtual home assistant
-Product display and showcasing
Not just in one field, but this type of display can be used in multiple areas.
Making them Probabilities:
-Advertising the project on Social media as its one of the most powerful tools these days.
-Make the project open and available to developers, so they can make apps and improve upon the software of the product
-Once the product is complete, I can raise money through a strong campaign on Kickstarter.
-There are a lot of companies working on such devices, so collaborating with them is an option to build a better product like there are home assistants like Alexa and Google, whose software can be given an avatar to virtually display them using this method.
-Simplification of design so it's easily available for all
-Attachment of various sensors, like gesture, motion etc can bring in a whole new range of uses to the system.
Final Project Slide & Video
The Slide can be accessed from here
The video can be accessed from here
Conclusion
I read through what licensing means, how to license my own project. Its easier to choose a license when you already know whats required and what you want out of the licensing. Apart from that thinking how my project can evolve was an eye opener as I have mentioned there are a lot of possibilities for this product to evolve.