WEEK-19

Invention, Intellectual Property, and Income

Individual Assignment

• 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

What is Patent Licenses?

A patent grants its owner the right to exclude others from practicing the patented invention, and it does not give the patent owner the right to practice the patented invention. Licenses should be understood in this context.

Exclusive license

Under an exclusive license, a patent owner transfers all indicia of ownership to the licensee only retaining the title to the patent. From the point of view of the patent owner, he surrenders all rights under the patent (including the right to sue for infringement and the right to license) to the licensee. In essence, the licensee steps into the shoes of the patent owner and acquire the right to sub-license the patent and sue for patent infringement. However, the exclusivity can be limited by a field of use. That means that the licensee gets a promise from the patent owner that the patent will not be licensed to anyone else in a stipulated field of use.

Non-exclusive license

By granting a non-exclusive license, the patent owner essentially promises not to sue the licensee for patent infringement. Some people think that by acquiring a non-exclusive license the licensee acquires the freedom to operate in the space protected by the licensed patent, but this may or may not be the case. It depends on whether or not the licensee’s products infringe other patents. Link

Advantages of Patent Licensing

Not all inventors want to make or sell products or designs. Patent licensing lets you profit from the rights to your invention. You can collect royalties from sales.
-Limited Risk
-Global Distribution
-Limited Time Period
-Eliminating Patent Infringement

Disdvantages of Patent Licensing

-Soliciting Manufacturers
-Low Success Rate

Approaches to Patent Licensing

One analogy that can be helpful is to look at licensing approaches in two ways: "carrot" licensing and "stick" licensing.

Carrot

This is when the person you want to do business with is not practicing the patented invention. They do not have to take a license. You must convince them that your patent technology is better than what they are using. Show them how licensing your product or services will help them make money. It's all about how you market your invention.

Stick

This is when the person you want to work with is infringing your patent. They are already using your patent technology. In this case, you must threaten them with a court case. They will license your product — or else. In reality, both situations involve the threat of a court case. In the carrot approach, an inevitable court case is just implied. In the stick approach, it is directly stated.
If you manage to get a large company to license your patent, you will get a lump sum payment that covers their past use of the product. You will also receive money based on future use. Link

Types of Licensing

These are some of the types of open source licenses.

Creative Commons license

A 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 people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that they have created. CC provides an author flexibility (for example, they might choose to allow only non-commercial uses of their own work) and protects the people who use or redistribute an author's work from concerns of copyright infringement as long as they abide by the conditions that are specified in the license by which the author distributes the work.

MIT License

The MIT License is a permissive free software license originating at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). As a permissive license, it puts only very limited restriction on reuse and has, therefore, an excellent license compatibility. The MIT license permits reuse within proprietary software provided that all copies of the licensed software include a copy of the MIT License terms and the copyright notice. The MIT license is also compatible with many copyleft licenses, such as the GNU General Public License (GPL); MIT licensed software can be integrated into GPL software, but not the other way around

GNU General Public License

The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or GPL) is a widely used free software license, which guarantees end users the freedom to run, study, share and modify the software. The license was originally written by Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) for the GNU Project, and grants the recipients of a computer program the rights of the Free Software Definition. The GPL is a copyleft license, which means that derivative work can only be distributed under the same license terms. This is in distinction to permissive free software licenses, of which the BSD licenses and the MIT License are widely used examples. GPL was the first copyleft license for general use.

GNU Lesser General Public License

The GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) is a free software license published by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The license allows developers and companies to use and integrate software released under the LGPL into their own (even proprietary) software without being required by the terms of a strong copyleft license to release the source code of their own components. The license only requires software under the LGPL be modifiable by end users via source code availability. For proprietary software, code under the LGPL is usually used in the form of a shared library, so that there is a clear separation between the proprietary and LGPL components. The LGPL is primarily used for software libraries, although it is also used by some stand-alone applications.

BSD licenses

BSD licenses are a family of permissive free software licenses, imposing minimal restrictions on the use and redistribution of covered software. This is in contrast to copyleft licenses, which have reciprocity share-alike requirements. The original BSD license was used for its namesake, the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), a Unix-like operating system. The original version has since been revised and its descendants are more properly termed modified BSD licenses. The BSD license is a simple license that merely requires that all code be licensed under the BSD license if redistributed in source code format.

Apache licenses

The Apache License is a permissive free software license written by the Apache Software Foundation (ASF).The Apache License, Version 2.0 requires preservation of the copyright notice and disclaimer. Like other free software licenses, the license allows the user of the software the freedom to use the software for any purpose, to distribute it, to modify it, and to distribute modified versions of the software, under the terms of the license, without concern for royalties. This makes ALv2 a FRAND-RF license. The ASF and its projects release the software they produce under the Apache License and many non-ASF projects are also using the ALv2.

MIT VS CC

After reading through the brief of each license, I decide to use either MIT or CC, as they are easy to understand and use. The MIT license is one of the shortest licenses of all the major recognized open source licenses. The full text is just 3 paragraphs long. So I went on to analyze them both and find the right one.

Creative Commons License

The Creative Commons copyright licenses and tools forge a balance inside the traditional “all rights reserved” setting that copyright law creates. Our tools give everyone from individual creators to large companies and institutions a simple, standardized way to grant copyright permissions to their creative work. The combination of our tools and our users is a vast and growing digital commons, a pool of content that can be copied, distributed, edited, remixed, and built upon, all within the boundaries of copyright law.

Three “Layers” Of Licenses

These are some of the advantages of choosing CC license

Legal code

Each license begins as a traditional legal tool, in the kind of language and text formats that most lawyers know and love. We call this the Legal Code layer of each license

Human Readable

The Commons Deed (also known as the “human readable” version of the license)is a handy reference for licensors and licensees, summarizing and expressing some of the most important terms and conditions. Think of the Commons Deed as a user-friendly interface to the Legal Code beneath, although the Deed itself is not a license, and its contents are not part of the Legal Code itself.

Machine Readable

Machine-readable license design recognizes that software, from search engines to office productivity to music editing, plays an enormous role in the creation, copying, discovery, and distribution of works. In order to make it easy for the Web to know when a work is available under a Creative Commons license, "machine readable" version of the license is provided.

Types of licenses

Attribution (BY)

Licensees may copy, distribute, display and perform the work and make derivative works and remixes based on it only if they give the author or licensor the credits (attribution) in the manner specified by these.

Share-alike (SA)

Licensees may distribute derivative works only under a license identical ("not more restrictive") to the license that governs the original work. (See also copyleft.) Without share-alike, derivative works might be sublicensed with compatible but more restrictive license clauses, e.g. CC-BY to CC-BY-NC.)

Non-commercial (NC)

Licensees may copy, distribute, display, and perform the work and make derivative works and remixes based on it only for non-commercial purposes.

No Derivative Works (ND))

Licensees may copy, distribute, display and perform only verbatim copies of the work, not derivative works and remixes based on it. As per the license selected the project can be determined as, least open to most open. The following images will give an idea about the same.

MIT license

A short, permissive software license. Basically, you can do whatever you want as long as you include the original copyright and license notice in any copy of the software/source. There are many variations of this license in use. This paragraph is the entire license itself.Link

Copyright "YEAR" "COPYRIGHT HOLDER"

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.

CAN:

-Commercial use
-Modification
-Distribution
-Sublicense
-Private Use

Cannot:

-Hold Liable

Must:

-Include copyright’
-Include License.


This summarizes the entire MIT license

Choosing the License

As I mentioned earlier the project has many possibilities. So I would like to choose a license that allows the user to modify, share and edit the design as long as he/she gives credit and does the same. Most of the other license is great for open source projects, as they have very minimal restrictions and no modifications be done to them, while in CC license the user gets to choose certain sub-division within the license as per his/her requirement. Another major factor to use CC licenses for my purpose is that MIT and BSD license is used mostly for software licensing and CC is for Design.
So I used CC to license my project

The right type of License can be chosen with the help of a license picker.
Link

License Features

This shows the icons of what the license type is and if it's a free culture license or not.

Selected License

The next column is the machine readability we saw earlier. It will help in google searches and other forms of electronic searches.

Machine - Readability

The next part is to copy the embedded code on to the website

Embedded Code

The following icon shows under what terms my project is licensed.

Automatic Hot Water Dispenser by Tariq Ahmed Shaikh is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at http://fabacademy.org/2019/labs/khairpur/students/tariq-ahmed/.

Plan for Dissemination

Knowledge is actually meant to be shared, we keeps on growing by sharing and gaining knowledge continuously, it not only help the other person to improve but polishes our skills as well.The project is going to be an open source non-commercial project. The project is still prototype and need time to make it more furnished to be as product.

To launch this product commercially, I have to introduce my project to different Restaurants, Universities, homes and shops. The project need a marketing team to work for sale this product.

Final Project Slide

Final Project Video

« Week18 Week20 »


Automatic Hot Water Dispenser by Tariq Ahmed Shaikh is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at http://fabacademy.org/2019/labs/khairpur/students/tariq-ahmed/.