19. Invention, intellectual property and income¶
Goal(s):
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
Outcome¶
As soon as this project was prototyped in August 2018, I wrote to the team at Skipping Rocks Lab to enquire about any machine that was due to be produced for this process and I only received a reply in May 2019 stating that the team wasn keen on focusing on the EU and UK market with no plans to expand to the Asia/Pacific region at the moment.
At this point, I took a decision to make the process of building the machine Open-Source so that this process need not be bottle-necked by the presence or absence of the Founding team.
As a Fablab, we are also involved with the Precious Plastic Project as Machine Builders in Bangalore and will e making a clear documentataion video for diseminating the process as quickly as possible.
The License Dilemma¶
The key reason of having IP ownership seems to be mainly for financial benefits. The owner will be paid for the use of their IP in any forms (patents/copyrights) which should be very tempting for creators, and many times may also be needed to sustain funding. But for the improvement technology, openness and sharing the IP is very key. If we notice many things happened during the course of the fabacdemy due to the availablity of knowledge in the open space freely. A brief search on the internet pointed me to choosealicense.com website which illustrates the various license choices in a simple way and also aids us in selecting an appropriate license.
Creative Commons License¶
A Creative Commons (CC) license is a public copyright license 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.
There are several types of CC licenses. The details are found on page. Of all these licenses ‘Attribution CC BY’ is the accommodating of licenses offered. This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation.
Following are the license terms as found on cc/by/4.0
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. 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. CC BY is recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials. I have got funding from my employer for the project materials, and I will be taking the fabwheel to my workplace. Slowly will be adding a mini generator, augmented games, walk adaptable lighting etc to the fabwheel. So a more accomadating license is required for my project, as more spinoffs based on the orginal design will be made, and few of these spinoffs may need a more restricting licenses based on the incoperated features. So for my project, in its current status, I would like to go for Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license.
For this project, I have decided to go with an Open-Source Hardware design license using Creative Commons or TAPR License for hardware
