Week 20

Invention, intellectual property, and income

This week's lecture talked about the life cycle of an invention, the patents, copyrights, about protecting our ideas, raising funds and getting into business.

This week's assignment is to assume success and develop a plan for dissemination of the final project. In addition to this, we have to prepare the draft of the summary slide (presentation.png, 1920x1080) and video clip (presentation.mp4, 1080p HTML5, < ~minute, < ~10 MB) and to put them in our root directory.

Intellectual "Property"

The human intellect is the distributed collection of the inferences from sytematic observation happened over centuries. Considering human intellect as a “property” itself is a misnormer. When a property is taken away from us, we loose it. However, thats not the case with any of our idea, invention, knowledge or the intellect. It still remains with us, even after sharing.

Every individual stands atop the platform created by the accumulated knowledge of his forerunners. It is only by making use of this capital, the individual exists. Nothing should deprive any human beings from his right to use, share and build upon this capital which itself drives the the world. It is in this context the several laws related to intelectual “property” like the patent law, copyright law, trademark law etc assumes significance. However, the laws are only being used for the betterment of private businesses and is having a harmful effect on the advancement of the human race. This makes a person liable to take account of these laws and to act, so as to ensure that his idea/invention is freely available to the world and not monopolasied by a private entity.

Patent Law

Patent laws are intended to give an incentive to the individuals who comes up with a useful idea by giving a temporary monopoly over the use of the idea. For obtaining a patent, the idea should be novel, non obvious and usefull. There are two types of patent, utility patent and design patent. The utility patent is about how something works and design patent is about how it is designed. The patent document has to describe how to practise the invention. After the description, a precise claim is written down, for which the patent is granted. Patents are not granted gloablly but nationally. One has to obtain patent in each country and pay seperatley for that. The submitted patent will be examined by the authoirty of the country which is a very slow process. The Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) helps in filing patents across multiple countries by easing up the examination process.

For protecting the business interest, many inventions are kept private so as to obtain patent before making the public disclosure. Typically one begins with filing a provisional patent by defensively discolsing an idea. This gives him one year to convert it into a full patent and protect the invention from being patented by another person during the period.

However, obtaining a patent deosnt protect the invention. Even with a patent, one has to constantly watch for infringement and in the event of finding one, all the patent does is that it allows to go to court. Patent has to be maintained as one has to pay fees to keep it active.

Patents assumes significance only for inventions which requires a million dollar investment.

Copyright Law

Copyright law is not for an invention and applies to crreative works including technical creative works like cad design, software programmes,circuits etc. The act of creating creates the copyright. It protects the idea by regulating the use of the creative work by another person by protecting what right one can give away and what one want’s to protect. Copyright covers the terms under which the work can be reproduced, modified, distributed, performed, displayed etc. Only individuals can register a copyright. The ideas has to be written down in a physical form in order to get protected by copyright.

Copyright is easier to get with a for a term of a life time and 70 more years. There are many free copyright licenses like the creative commons, GNU GPL,GNU LGPL, BSD, MIT, Apache license etc. The general goal of copyright is to share it for the larger good. Websites like Gitlab, fabcloud, instrutables etc are examples of copyrighted sharing.

Trademark Law

Trademark law does not apply to an invention or a creative work, but applies to protect the name/mark etc of something. This enables the buyers to know what they are buying. Trademarks defends the mark and is only useful if defended and protected against infringement.

Income & Business

People start businesses primarily to find a living or for the greed to become rich. Businesses with a vision to bring change in the world often become successful. Businesses also become succeessful when the person does something just beacuse he like to do that particular thing with his life. Before getting into a business and to generate income from a business, a business model/plan is the first requirement. Identifying what to sell is the first step in making a business model.

Invention does not make the business. Income can be generated from an invention of a product by selling the product. It can come from selling consumables in a product (like catridges in a printer), by selling licenses for the product invented. Hence the first step is generating income is to identify what to sell. Actually one is not selling a product, but the the benefits of it. Google’s product is not the search, it gives away search freely and sell the people who search.

Apart from a physical product, one can can create a platform and sell the platform (ex amazon which is a platform for the product), one can can make the infrastructure that makes it possible to sell the product and sell the infrastructure (ex amazon services), once can sell services instead of a product, one can sell knowledge, entertainment etc. One can propose reasearch and sell it by making the research itself as the product. One can collect and sell data (like data from drones)

Almost every business plan fails when it turns to reality. Every business works when the number is less than 10, but fails over a larger market. The common reason for failures are lack of fund and lack of managemnt. It is where the accelerators, incubators and manufacturer incubators comes into play. These helps to turn the idea/invention into a business by giving help to line up manufacturers, by protecting the invention, by marketing and creating markets, by building a management team etc.

Plan for the dissimination of the Final Project.

By assuming the privilage to stand on the shoulders of giants, we are obliged to credit our intellect to our forerunners and to not consider the mighty "collective intellect" as a private property. Hence, we need to defend our idea/invention so that it is available freely in the public domain, so that anyone can work upon it and take it further.

After going through the licensing terms of the different licenses like the GNU-GPL, GNU-LGPL, Creative Commons, MIT etc, GNU-GPL is what attracted me for its strong copyleft aspects and the essential four freedom that a free software gives to its users. The Preamble of the GNU-GPL begins with the following line. “The GNU General Public License is a free, copyleft license for software and other kinds of works.” When the hardware and software of a system are viewed seperately, all of the digital data is to be classified as a software. Hence, the design files, codes, documentation etc which are primarily data, are to be classified as softwares. The preamble of the GNU-GPL also empowers anyone to use GPL on any kind of work with a sole requirement to publish the "source code" of the work, which is defined as the preferred form of work that enables anyone to make changes.

Since Fab Academy has given the freedom to choose any license of choice for my work, and for the betterment of the work and for the four freedom its offers to its end users, i prefer to dissiminate my work in the public domain by licensing it with the GNU-General Public License v3 .

By providing links to the original design files, the “source code” as required by GNU-GPL is published. To make my work truly free, it has to be accompanied with a free documentation and hence the documentation is licensed with GNU Free Documentation License.

Making the Business

The Final project as a product does not qualify to be directly distributed to a market for the refinements it demands. Before manufacturing the end product after refinement, the potential market has to be identified and studied. The motor vehicles that are plying on the roads these days are fitted with advanced digital guages cutting down the potential market to the bicycles. Speed measuring applications in other areas are also a potential market. Apart from selling the product, a speed measuring service can also make the business.

The housing and the elctronics has to be well integrated to make the entire unit more compact and sturdy. A mold for the compact housing is to be designed making it possible to mass manufacture it using a composite like fibre glass. The electronics is to be made easily customisable with a bigger display and can be manufactured in mass from China. The mechanism to rotate the magnet has to be made much smaller, lighter and stronger. It has to be casted in aluminium for which the mold is to be designed. The provision for the external connection to the rotating assembly is to be made adaptable to different types of rotating input.

To take the take the numbers between 0 to 10, the business will begin by selling a speedometer for the bicycles which is tailored to individual needs which will be entirely locally manufactured. To take it to more than 10, a specific type of bicycle (or a market for speed measuring application) is to be identified and the product is to be manufactured in mass locally and logistics is to be taken care of. The possibility to take the numbers more than 100 lies in selling advanced products and also customised service. Speed measurement as a service can be made possible in factories, assembly lines and places where machines are overhauled etc. Different management team has to be brought in for managing the customer relations, design, manufacturing and logistics. Investment has to be brought in at this stage and from the success of getting past 100, it will be better to avoid investors and opt for a loan. A success will repay the loan and result in a capital. For the numbers to get past 1000 the capital created is to be used for diversifying the business operation into selling products and advanced services integrated over the internet. This will require more investments and it is at this time, private investors are to be brought it after holding the controlling stake of the business.