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Assignment

Develop a plan for dissemination of your final project

Prepare a summary slide (presentation.png, 1920x1080)

Video clip (presentation.mp4, 1080p HTML5, < ~minute, < ~10 MB)

Put them in your root directory

The goal of this assignment is to develop a plan for dissemination of our final project. We should also look at possible licensing models to share our work

Intellectual property rights

Patents grants the owner / inventor a set of rights on ownership for a limited amount of time in exchange for public disclosure of details about the invention

There are two types of patents

1. Utility Patents : A patent on some feature or functionality

2. Design Patent : A patent on some design of a product

In order for the patent to be accepted, it has to be teaching. It has to teach the person reading it the art and science involved. So if I'm going to take a patent on a new method to unlock doors, In my patent application I have to explain the procedure very clearly so that the examiner can read and understand my method

This can be a problem since you have to disclose your idea to the public, and if your idea is easily replicable, then more copycats will follow

A patent has two parts

1. Specification : This is where you tell the story and explain in detail about your craft

2. Claim : This is a more specified section, where you claim what your patent covers. You have to be very careful in writing this section. If a claim is too general then the application will be rejected, and if a claim is too narrow, then it will not be useful. If a claim is unrelated, then the examiner will make you separate them

Once a patent is filed then it will be verified by the examiner, what they are looking for is. Is your idea Novel and non-obvious? Is it useful? Is is possible? Yes, the examiner will check if your idea is possible or not, but unfortunately the examiners are not the brightest scientists we have so sometimes some patents which are physically impossible do pass under the radar

Next is one of the important and less understood part of the patent. Will a patent protect you?

A patent doesn't protect you, all it gives is access to the court systems to litigate. You cannot stop anyone from infringing on your patent, you can only litigate if you find an infringement, like Neil said "The world is filled with bitter Small Inventors"

Let me drive this point further, if you have an idea and you patent it, it dosen't mean you can stop other people from copying your idea. All Your patent gives you is access to the court systems to litigate. You can take some one to court if you find that they are infringing on your patent, but this is long and messy and takes a lot of money

So what is a patent useful for?

1. You must be able to identify when someone is infringing on your patent

2. There must be some barrier to infringement to make it worth doing. If your idea is easily replicable, then its no use taking a patent on it

So unless you know when someone is infringing on your patent and infringement is not easy, then your patent won't protect you

Copyright

Copyrights are given for creative works. You can protect the engineering not for the design itself as a creative work, but for the design files themselves as a creative work. Intel copyrights the masks it uses to make its ICs

Copyrights are secured for creation, you don't need to file for a copyright.Copyrights have commercial value in licensing your work. Putting a copyright on your work will determine how people can use it and how you can benefit from it

Creative Commons

Creative commons was formulated primarily for sharing creative contents by creators legally. It states clearly whats all rights are reserved by the content creator and how the end user can use their work. The main point of this license is the 'commons' ideology. It is considered to be providing an alternative to the 'All rights received' copyright license to 'Some rights received' creative commons license

Under this license, You are free to

Share - copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format

Adapt - remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially

The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms which follows Attribution - You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use

No additional restrictions - You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits

MIT license

An MIT license has very limited restriction over reuse of the code. It is also compatible with many of the existing commonly used licenses like GPL and many other copyleft licenses. The license comes under the category of permissive licenses, which defined as "lets people do anything they want with your code as long as they provide attribution back to you and don't hold you liable"

The MIT License (MIT) 

Copyright (c) Year Copyright Holders Name>

     Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software

     and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction,

     including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute,

     sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is

     furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: The above copyright notice and this

     permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

     THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED,

     INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR

     PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE

     FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE,

     ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

Dissemination of my Work

1. I should be getting the credits for my work

2. If they have made a progress/modifications to my work, I need to know that, so does the rest of the world. Which means those who uses my work are required to share their work just like I did

3. I cannot be held responsible for any kind of harm caused by another party who used my work

My project is intended to be used as an useful and as an educational model, I have no commercial interests as of yet, but I also don't want anyone using my work commercially without my permission. I want people who are interested, to continue and improve my work and share it with others. Hence the licenses which fit the bill are MIT license and Creative Commons CC-BY-SA-NC

I prefer the CC-BY-SA License for all my Fab Academy documentation, the final project and all the assignments. This is because CC license is meant to cover all sorts of work like documentation, images etc and a lot of people are already familiar with Creative Commons

Income

My motivation to disseminate and continue my work after Fab Academy is most because of social and educational reasons. Social because my work will be open source and it can help build a community of people, who continually improve upon it.

As for Income sources, I have no commercial interests as of now

As Neil said, "You don't sell the thing, you sell the benefit of the thing." This is done by successful companies like Google and Facebook, They don't sell the thing you see, they give away the thing you see and sell the benefit of the thing. For example, Google doesn't sell search, it gives away search, but sells advertising related to search

I believe this is a crucial point which many businesses fail to see. You don't sell the thing, you sell the benefit of the thing

Neils lecture on patents and Intellectual property, it was very good. He shared a lot of information form his own experience

Conclusion

The week gave me an insight on various licensing platforms. It also gave me a vague idea about the marketing strategy for my final project, if at all I want to do buisness later on