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19. Invention, intellectual property and income

Assignment for this week

  • 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.

Dissemination plan

As mentioned earlier in Applications and implications this will be a minimum viable product just to test the functionality of the initial product while I learn more about digital fabrication and perhaps use it for research. Using it for research depends on the final product as there are still a few details to work out. The details for research are not yet clear, but the overall idea would be to test the efficacy of the device. For instance, how effective is the bot in reminding (forcing) people to take a break? There is still plenty of things to do before getting to that stage, but if successful, the results or at least the considerations for developing such a device maybe be published in different forums.

Later, depending on how this trial version turns out, I might improve it and perhaps develop a device with more interactive features for actual use. This later developments could be to link them to the already existing activity trackers and somehow synchronise the data.

The device is meant to be engaging and a fun way to get people to take frequent breaks during their working days.

License

I do not intend to turn anything that has been done during this time into a business. There are no limitations on use and it is enough if someone else can learn from my Fab Academy journey and reproduce anything that has come out of it. Considering the nature and intent of the site, the most logical license seems to be one of the Creative commons licenses.

Creative commons license provide an easy way to manage the copyright terms that attach automatically to all creative material under copyright. Our licenses allow that material to be shared and reused under terms that are flexible and legally sound. Creative Commons offers a core suite of six copyright licenses. Because there is no single “Creative Commons license,” it is important to identify which of the six licenses you are applying to your material, which of the six licenses has been applied to material that you intend to use, and in both cases the specific version....

CC licenses may be applied to any type of work, including educational resources, music, photographs, databases, government and public sector information, and many other types of material. The only categories of works for which CC does not recommend its licenses are computer software and hardware.

The licenses types 1:

  • Attribution
    CC BY

    This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered. Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials.

  • Attribution-ShareAlike
    CC BY-SA

  • This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial purposes, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. This license is often compared to “copyleft” free and open source software licenses. All new works based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use. This is the license used by Wikipedia, and is recommended for materials that would benefit from incorporating content from Wikipedia and similarly licensed projects.

  • Attribution-NoDerivs
    CC BY-ND

This license lets others reuse the work for any purpose, including commercially; however, it cannot be shared with others in adapted form, and credit must be provided to you.

  • Attribution-NonCommercial
    CC BY-NC

This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.

  • Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
    CC BY-NC-SA

This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms.

  • Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs
    CC BY-NC-ND

This license is the most restrictive of our six main licenses, only allowing others to download your works and share them with others as long as they credit you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially.

As my project is mostly just a physical product with limited software features, the second one of these licenses,Attribution-ShareAlike, which lets others remix, tweak, and build upon the work even for commercial purposes, as long as they credit the creator and license their new creations under the identical terms, seems the most logical.

If I improve the project further and it has potential for business, then i might later consider the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

Other potential licenses considered included:

Fab License

Fab Licence allows reproduction, modification, distribution, performance and display for any purpose, but requires acknowledgement a “project name”. Copyright is retained and must be preserved. The work will be provided as is; no warranty is provided, and users accept all liability.

The MIT License

The MIT License is a software license, that gives total freedom and rights to any person obtaining a copy of the software to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sell or sublicense the software. The only condition is that the original MIT license text must appear in any derivative work, even if the license changes.

(The … copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software).

A draft copy of the final presentation below.

Things to do:

  • Programming with Arduino
  • Design a casing for the electronics and the bot
  • Assemble the components.

Files

  1. CC Licenses ↩