18. Intellectual Property and Income¶
The assignment this week is to prepare our final project as well as a dissemination plan for it.
Intellectual Property¶
There are a lot of options to protect intellectual property but generally speaking defending intellectual property is an ongoing fight.
The first question is : Do you share your work ?
If you do, you can add layers of protection, if you don’t the only protection is the secret. As long as nobody knows it, it works.
Now what are the protections available ?
| Protections | Applicability | Procedure | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Copyright | “writable data”: so whatever you can store in a computer basically : picture, song, movie, text, code, … | Just mention the copyright in the files and the author | Free |
| Trademarks | Recognizable traits of your company, not related to a technical feature but marketing aspects | File a trademark dossier for each country | Relatively unexpensive |
| Design patent | the design, not necessarily the functional aspect nor the recognizable traits, improving usability for example | File a national dossier | Expensive |
| Utility patent | a technical solution, novel, non obvious | File a national or international dossier explaining how to reproduce your innovation (proving it cannot be reproduced sometimes can get the patent revoked) | Very expensive |
Overall limited intellectual property theft is enforced by the law besides counterfeits which is enforced at customs. For the rest, you have to fight for your own right which might get very expensive. Patents are just shields and swords that you pay for every year but you will need resources to use them if any one infringes on your rights and that can be very expensive !
Technically speaking, patents are interesting to protect high investment inventions in an environment where there are known actors.
Strategically speaking, patents can serve many purposes such as be used as prevent someone else from using a technology, to convince investors or even be used as a bargaining chip to get access to some IP of another company.
Dissemination Plan¶
For the future of my project, I will provide it fully open source under a free license, the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA.
I consider that it’s very important to understand the definition of a real Free license. So what is it ?
Check CreativeCommons website to learn more
I do not intend to pursue a commercial interest through it but I’d love for other people to continue working on this if my contribution helps them in that direction it’s for the better.
Foldable Photogrammetry Scanner de Jason Pettiaux est mis à disposition selon les termes de la licence Creative Commons Attribution - Partage dans les Mêmes Conditions 4.0 International.
Slide¶
Video¶
I have worked on gathering videos of the processes of making my project but did not create the video with them yet.
However I have a video plan:
- Demonstrate the project capability
- Summarize the processes involved
- Laser Cutting
- 3D printing
- Electronics
I will use both pictures and some short videos.
Let’s start working on it !