<h1>Invention, Intellectual Property and Income</h1> <h4>Wednesday 30 May, 2018</h4> ###The final episode Not a particularly exciting one this week. Create and document a license for your final project. Develop a plan for dissemination of your final project. Prepare a summary slide and video clip. --- For licencing, I had a look at a few different ones. I've dealt with patents before and I'm not particularly fond of them, and in most situations the likelihood of any other person giving a crap about your idea is pretty slim. It's even less likely that they would possess the skills or means to produce it. The probability that you would need to protect your idea is low, and the sheer amount of resources you would need to summon just to defend the idea makes it hardly worth it. From my experience in the startup world, good ideas succeed on speed of iteration and standard of quality. You don't have to be the first to market (take for example MySpace and Facebook), and really what you should be doing is keeping up with what your customers want. From my experience in the startup world, good ideas succeed on speed of iteration and standard of quality. You don't have to be the first to market (take for example MySpace and Facebook), and really what you should be doing is keeping up with what your customers want. I hate to use the example of Microsoft and Apple, but if you even take a quick look at the history of that epic battle: + Apple releases awesome well thought out product + Microsoft copies it + Microsoft butchers the product while Apple maintains a standard of quality + Both Apple and Microsoft still neck and neck for many years (It's a misconception that Microsoft was significantly more popular, they only won out in large commercial deals) + Apple fails to keep up with computing demand losing the high performance market + Microsoft fails to keep up with personal experience (UX) applicable to majority of market share + Apple takes the lead + Microsoft takes a few goes at a better user experience encompassing their Surface branch of hardware + Microsoft making a comeback + What happens next? Find out next season.. I find that whole story very interesting, and bringing in younger players like Google, Samsung and Facebook provides a plethora of learnings to be made about the world of digital innovation. --- Likely the best way to quickly understand licences (namely which one you should consider) is to list out to what degree you wish to exploit your idea: + Do I want people to know I was the author? + Do I want to make money? + Do I want others to have this? + Do I want others to be able to sell this? + Do I want people to be able to modify this? In addition to Neil's lecture about licences, TLDR Legal has an awesome collection of summaries for the most popular licences. <a href="https://tldrlegal.com/license/bsd-3-clause-license-(revised)">BSD-3</a> <a href="https://tldrlegal.com/license/gnu-general-public-license-v3-(gpl-3)">GNU-GPL-3</a> <a href="https://tldrlegal.com/license/gnu-lesser-general-public-license-v3-(lgpl-3)">GNU-LGPL-3</a> I considered Creative Commons, but I really have to spend more time digging to understand how I would commercialise the project before deciding to use it. General Public Licence (GPL) GNU has an apt comparison on their <a href="https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html">website</a> : "The GNU Project has two principal licenses to use for libraries. One is the GNU Lesser GPL; the other is the ordinary GNU GPL. The choice of license makes a big difference: using the Lesser GPL permits use of the library in proprietary programs; using the ordinary GPL for a library makes it available only for free programs." The Apache Licence obtained from: https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0 <img src="media/week19/apache-licence-template.png" style="width:100%"/> Suuuper awesome site for understanding the different licences in human-readable (definitely not legal counsel however): <a href="https://tldrlegal.com/license/apache-license-2.0-(apache-2.0)">Apache-2.0</a> <br> <br> --- ##Finishing up Copyright is only respected primarily in the States as some countries are not participants. I settled on this one because it is the simplest and it applies only the fundamental rights to the author without much fluff. <a href="presentation-draft.png">Link to my draft slide is here.</a> <a href="presentation.png">Link to my actual slide is here.</a> <a href="presentation.mp4">Link to my presentation video is here.</a> + **What's the future of this project? What would you do if someone asked for 10,000 of them?** Well, it depends how it goes from here. Neil asked me in my presentation what I would do and I told him I was waiting for some money to come along. He said people would be pretty interested in making it happen, but I would have to go to them. I'd be glad to, but as always there's a lot to consider. The long answer is, if there was a way to develop this project that was sustainable, then I'd gladly continue to grow it until I could hire a team and sell it to construction companies, prototyping places etc. As I said in Week 18, if I secured investment to build a startup around it I'd grab my smartest friends and we'd release something in a few months. Frosti and I discussed the potential for the Innovation Department in Iceland (where Bas also works) to support the development of this project. This would probably be embodied as an employment position specifically working on this project and showing it off at schools around the Nordic region. This is a type of engagement I'd be interested in as well. Lastly Wendy asked about whether I'd consider doing a Kickstarter for this. I have some verbose feelings about kickstarter, but in a nutshell I think that if I can't raise money in a more traditional way i.e. investment or sponsorship, then I must have some bigger problems to solve first. Kickstarter is great for a select few situations. Traditionally kickstarter projects fail because they promise the world at a discount price and then fail to scale to production effectively. In all things, you get to pick which problems you want to solve, and personally I feel better about handling investors and sponsors than running what's effectively a publicly trading company in an early prototype phase. If you're asking me to pick how many inadequately informed investors I'd prefer to have sifting through my progress trying to find out how far they can stretch their money and requesting new features - I would pick fewer. That's not to say I wouldn't run a Kickstarter-backed project, I just don't prefer it over the regular model. I've raised a lot of capital in my career (for a technical person in the Australian startup scene) and I've found it's easy enough and fast enough to raise through the traditional pitch-deck method. So at that, I guess we'll see how it goes! If you know anyone, feel free to let them know I'm looking for an opportunity! --- ###Sorry for an uneventful final week. It was hectic getting ready for the <a href=project03.html>Grand Finale</a> but make sure to check it out and the video!