19. Invention, intellectual property and income¶

Assignment:

~~Outline future possibilities and described how to make them probabilities~~ ~~Prepare a draft summary slide and video~~

As a recovering attorney, I have quite a bit of experience with intellectual property law. The big take-away is that the law cannot protect ideas, words, or inventions anymore.

I have written textbooks and they are copyrighted, yet people insist on photocopying chapters out of them and using them in the classroom. (Ironically, my textbooks are on legal ethics.) Back in the 1990s, during the dot-com boom, my partner and I “invented” an online service for people in the engineering world and we sold our website (and idea) to investors just in time to get out before the Great Dot Com Crash. In a month, there were several copy-cats of what we had built, effectly diluting any value our invented service might have had.

My father actually invented the first light-weight golf bag only to have his design stolen by one of the big golf companies. He also invented the first macadamia nut cracker (have you ever tried to get into one of those nuts?) but there wasn’t much of a market outside of the knick-knack category.

And my brother became a multi-millionaire by inventing something that Bill Gates eventually bought. He then invented a molecule that will go through the blood-brain barrier, only to find out that another fellow had a patent on all molecules designed to go through the blood-brain barrier. (And wouldn’t you think that such a broad patent would be invalid?)

So, this whole invention thing runs in the family....which is why I know that it’s no longer worthwhile getting a patent. Regardless of international trade agreements, everything can be built more cheaply in countries that don’t have unions and laws that protect workers. They will take your invention, make it cheaper, sell it by the dozens, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.

As Neil said, patents don’t protect you - they just give you a legal claim. As a former attorney I can tell you that defending your legal claim is more expensive than you can afford and over time it won’t be worth it. (Think about Kodak and how much money it spent defending its “quick photo” technology…only to go out of business because you can do the same thing on your phone for free.)

All of that aside, my intention was always to make patterns for toys that everyone can access, for free, and make them for children everywhere. For that reason, in addition to the ones listed above, I choose a public domain designation (rather than any of the Creative Commons licenses) for all of my patterns and inventions.

Research¶

“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 other people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that they (the author) have created.” (from the Creative Commons website)

CC provides lots of different kinds of licenses, most of which require the originator to get “credit” by any subsequent user, commercial or not. I’m not interested in credit (as if anyone ever pays any attention to this requirement) and have chosen, instead, the public domain route. Public domain is typically applied to old written works. In the United States, written works created after January 1, 1978, are protected by copyright during the life of the author plus an additional 70 years.

But with the advent of piratebay and the like, even copyrighted materials are freely distributed. The internet has changed everything.

The term “public domain” refers to creative materials that are not protected by intellectual property laws such as copyright, trademark, or patent laws. The public owns these works, not an individual author or artist. Anyone can use a public domain work without obtaining permission, but no one can ever own it.

My toy plans belong in the public domain because I want them to belong to the public, be distributed freely, over and over again, changed and adapted, without crediting me.

Dissemination¶

I suspect that the entire world searches for great projects the same way I do: Google

I have a website for my plans and projects: idealablearning.com I get a fair number of hits (a few thousand) per month. Most of my hits come from schools and teachers. The words “lab” and “makerspace” and “learning” pretty much get people to me.

I ran my SEO score. It’s not bad (54/100) considering I never gave marketing much thought before.

To make my website and projects even more find-able by Google search (to increase my SEO), there are a few more steps I can take:

Submit my Website URL to Google.
Select the right keywords. The words “lab” and “makerspace” and “learning” pretty much get people to me but I can add more words like “toys”, “imagination”, “dollhouse” (is that one word?)
Optimize for RankBrain. RankBrain is a component of Google’s labyrinth of algorithms that uses machine learning to parse the most relevant results to search engine queries. Of course, the better the query, the better the result, so part of marketing should be teaching people how to design an effective searchh query.
Include Meta Tags. Meta tags are little pieces of text that describe a webpage’s content. Meta tag words don’t appear on the page itself. They are in the page’s code.
Add my website to local directories. (A subcategory of this is having other easily searchable pages like in Etsy or Pinterest. Labor intensive and I’m not sure of the effectiveness. I could also get my work out there by doing a lesson for Instructables, Snapguide, Brit + Co and Craftsy.)
Make sure my site is mobile friendly. I could really use some work here. I’m not much of a mobile web browser user (because it’s too hard to read on a phone) but I know that other are.

And, of course, having my work on my FabAcademy page will help, as well.

Bill of Materials¶

My intent was to make the Electronic Doll House out of exclusively “left over” materials so that the cost would be negligible.

Approximately 2 sq. feet of 6mm plywood (walls and furniture)
Approximately 1 sq. foot of 3mm plywood (kitchen built-ins and furniture, trellis)
Approximately 4 sq. inches of clear plexi (sliding glass doors and fireplace)
Approximately 6 sq. inches of sticky-back paper for printer/vinyl cutter (vines and wallpaper)
A small amount of 3D printer filament (kitchen sink, faucets, knobs, light fixtures)
5 LED lights (about $.06 each)
1 9V battery (about $1.00)
1 9V battery pack with on/off switch ($3.25 each) (That’s the big-ticket item)
There is also a circuit board to be made for the clap on device, the fuse box board to make (so copper plated pcb board is required) and misc. wires to connect the lights to the battery

Originally, the design was for just one room - just the living room - but I was having so much fun making the house that I decided to make the kitchen, too.

The original design had separate battery power for each light but it evolved into an old-fashioned “fuse box”. All of the lighting wires went through the walls, to the back of the house (patio area) and up into a fusebox designed like a circuit board.