Week 17: Invention, Intellectual Property and Income

What should I do this week?

In this seventeenth week of Fab Academy, the goal is to develop a plan for dissemination of your final project, prepare drafts of your summary slide and video clip and put them in your root directory. Since, I changed my final project to weather display, I think I need to do a lot of extra work for this week. Further learnings are listed below:

Demonstrate the plan for dissemination of your final project.
Prepare draft of summary slide and video clip
Think about future scope for this project
Start the work if you haven't done anything till now
Learn about the process of patenting, trademark, copyright and promote open sorcing

Week 17: Action Plan

Day	Operation
Wednesday	Prof. Neil's class on Invention, Intellectual Property and Income.
Thursday	Invention
Friday	Intellectual Property
Saturday	Income
Sunday	Documentation
Monday	Documentation
Tuesday	Project Review

Project Planning

For project management, I am using Meister Task. The app is similar to Trello, but I love the theme of this app compared to Trello. The following image show I how I am planning for my final project.

Introduction

Atlast, I have reached the last week of Fab Academy course. It's been a roller coaster ride and I enjoyed a lot. To be honest, last 5 months were hectic as well as challenging but I love taking risks and this was a fruitful journey. Coming to IPs, Trademarks,etc. I am previously aware of these concepts as I have personal experience in drafting and filing patents. I had also worked with a team when I was in undergraduate studies which had taught me the process to register for copyright, trademark etc. But the sad part is that, these fancy items are quite expensive to afford for an individual. Even though I love earning IPs, I will be keeping the project opensource for people to learn, change and replicate the same. The Fab Academy won't be possible if all other's have protected their works which might have resulted in confusion and stress. Anyway, this week would help me to revise all the concepts:

What exactly is intellectual property?

According to WIPO, Intellectual property (IP) refers to creations of the mind, such as inventions; literary and artistic works; designs; and symbols, names and images used in commerce. IP is protected in law by, for example, patents, copyright and trademarks, which enable people to earn recognition or financial benefit from what they invent or create. By striking the right balance between the interests of innovators and the wider public interest, the IP system aims to foster an environment in which creativity and innovation can flourish.\ Intellectual property is divided into two categories: Industrial Property includes patents for inventions, trademarks, industrial designs and geographical indications. There are also more specialized or derived varieties of sui generis exclusive rights, such as circuit design rights (called mask work rights in the US) and supplementary protection certificates for pharmaceutical products (after expiry of a patent protecting them) and database rights (in European law). Companies are diligent when it comes to identifying and protecting intellectual property because it holds such high value in today's increasingly knowledge-based economy. Also, producing value intellectual property requires heavy investments in brainpower and time of skilled labor. This translates into heavy investments by organizations and individuals that should not be accessed with no rights by others.

Extracting value from intellectual property and preventing others from deriving value from it is an important responsibility for any company. Intellectual property can take many forms. Although it's an intangible asset, intellectual property can be far more valuable than a company's physical assets. Intellectual property can represent a competitive advantage and as a result, is fiercely guarded and protected by the companies that own the property. The different types of intellectual property are:

Patents

A patent is a property right for an investor that's typically granted by a government agency such as the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The patent allows the inventor exclusive rights to the invention, which could be a design, process, an improvement, or physical invention such as a machine. Technology and software companies often have patents for their designs. For example, the patent for the personal computer was filed in 1980 by Steve Jobs and three other colleagues at Apple Inc.

Copyrights

Copyright provides authors and creators of original material the exclusive right to use, copy, or duplicate their material. Authors of books have their works copyrighted as do musical artists. A copyright also states that the original creators can grant anyone authorization through a licensing agreement to use the work.

Trademarks

A trademark is a symbol, phrase, or insignia that is recognizable and represents a product that legally separates it from other products. A trademark is exclusively assigned to a company, meaning the company owns the trademark so that no others may use or copy it. A trademark is often associated with a company's brand. For example, the logo and brand name of "Coca Cola," is owned by the Coca-Cola Company (KO).

Franchises

A franchise is a license that a company, individual, or party–called the franchisee–purchases allowing them to use a company's–the franchisor–name, trademark, proprietary knowledge, and processes.

Trade Secrets

A trade secret is a company's process or practice that is not public information, which provides an economic benefit or advantage to the company or holder of the trade secret. Trade secrets must be actively protected by the company and are typically the result of a company's research and development. Examples of trade secrets could be a design, pattern, recipe, formula, or proprietary process. Trade secrets are used to create a business model that differentiates the company's offerings to its customers by providing a competitive advantage.

Trade dress

Trade dress is a legal term of art that generally refers to characteristics of the visual and aesthetic appearance of a product or its packaging (or even the design of a building) that signify the source of the product to consumers.

Plant varieties

Plant breeders' rights or plant variety rights are the rights to commercially use a new variety of a plant. The variety must amongst others be novel and distinct and for registration the evaluation of propagating material of the variety is considered.

Open Source Intiative Licenses

Before joining fab academy, I never ever had an intention to make the projects that I had done free to use for everyone. I always beleived that the effort that I had put in must be protected and felicitated. Later I found that, during worst times, there is a need for opensource innovation compared to protected commertialization. Opensource designs of ventilators, oxygen concentrators, face shields etc. had already saved a lot of lives during the pandemic. I also found that opensourcing not only promotes innovation but also enhances accessibility of the product who are in need. From now onwards, I would always advocate opensource projects as our existance is not known for the number of patents that we own, but for the sheer number of opensource projects that we had contributed to the society. I am also proud to say that, the Superfablab Kochi also created an opensource 'Alternative Respiratory Assistance Equipment' to fight Covid 19 pandemic. Some of the open source licenses are:

Apache License 2.0
GNU General Public License (GPL)
MIT license
Mozilla Public License 2.0
Common Development and Distribution License
Creative Commons
Eclipse Public License

MIT License

It is the most liberal than most other licenses and anyone can use and modify the software when they speacify original file and creator's name . The only condition is that it be accombanied by license agreement.The MIT license declaration is given below.


    The MIT License

    Copyright  

    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 personsf 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.

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. There are currently three versions of license are available under GNU. The terms and conditions of the GPL must be made available to anybody receiving a copy of the work that has a GPL applied to it ("the licensee"). Any licensee who adheres to the terms and conditions is given permission to modify the work, as well as to copy and redistribute the work or any derivative version. Software under the GPL may be run for all purposes, including commercial purposes and even as a tool for creating proprietary softwares. 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.

Creative Commons

Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share.The organization has released several copyright-licenses known as Creative Commons licenses free of charge to the public. These licenses allow creators to communicate which rights they reserve, and which rights they waive for the benefit of recipients or other creators. An easy-to-understand one-page explanation of rights, with associated visual symbols, explains the specifics of each Creative Commons license. Creative Commons licenses do not replace copyright, but are based upon it. They replace individual negotiations for specific rights between copyright owner (licensor) and licensee, which are necessary under an "all rights reserved" copyright management, with a "some rights reserved" management employing standardized licenses for re-use cases where no commercial compensation is sought by the copyright owner. The result is an agile, low-overhead and low-cost copyright-management regime, profiting both copyright owners and licenses.

Types of Licenses

The CC licenses all grant the "baseline rights", such as the right to distribute the copyrighted work worldwide for non-commercial purposes, and without modification. The details of each of these licenses depend on the version, and comprises a selection out of four conditions:

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.here you can view View license deed and View legal code
SHARE-ALIKE (SA): Licensees may distribute derivative works only under a license identical ("not more restrictive") to the license that governs the original work. Without share-alike, derivative works might be sublicensed with compatible but more restrictive license clauses, e.g. CC BY to CC BY-NC.) here you can view View license deed and View legal code
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.here you can view View license deed and View legal code

Dissemination Plan

Licensing my work

I decided to create a license for my project using Creative Commons.Based on these choices Creative Commons selects the following license: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). This licenses indicates that others can share and adapt my final project as long as they give appropriate credit and indicate if changes were made. And when they shape or adapt my work they should distribute my contributions under the same license. In addition, they may not use the material of my final project for commercial purposes. You can also easily create license by going to Creative Commons. This is the sample license that I had created since I haven't found a perfect name for my final project.

Fab Academy Journey by Abhinav Ajith is licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International

Dissemination Plan

Business Opportunities

Since this product is specifically made for common people of my state Kerala, so if I am thinking about business, the best way to market this project is via the goverment itself. I can work with the goverment to provide this product at a subsidized cost to the people so that every person will have access to it. The Disaster Management Authorities can market this project and sell it based on subscription model. The revenue can be generated based on profit sharing model with me. The mass production of this can be done with local workshops and fablabs in the state of Kerala so that it would also create an employment for them.

Applications

Tsunami Alert System
Aesthetic Weather Maps
Flood Alert System

Future Plans

More parameters to display using LCD screen
Voice alert system
Inbuilt battery system

Preparing the summary slide

For preparing the summary slide, I had used Inkscape. The following steps were involved

Created new file in Inkscape
Selected the width as 1920px and height as 1080px
Imported the main images and icons
Added Creative Common License
Named the slide as presentation.png
Saved it to root directory
Pushed it to gitlab

Preparing the video clip

For preparing the video clip, I had used Movavi Video Editor. I had used the trial version to edit and export the video.

Then I imported all the images, videos and audio which I took during the making of the project.

Next, I exported the video in 1080p but the size went upto 74MB, so I had used an online compression tool to make the file size below 10MB without loosing quality

After compression, I renamed the video as presentation.mp4 and saved it to root directory. Finally I had pushed it to gitlab.

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Week 18