WEEK 17
17. Invention, Intellectual Property, and Income
My project is a machine that is already produced and marketed by makers and manufacturers around the world. The thing that makes it unique is the ball-bearing system I invented.
I would like as many people as possible to use my system and since my project is open source and open hardware I would like others to keep it that way.
I want others to download my project files, so they can make their own machine, implement it and even use it for commercial use as long as I'm credited; I also want others to give their modified product the same license, so I chose a Creative Common Attribution License with the Share Alike feature.
Creative Common License
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.
Online text
ROTOCASTit by Saverio Silli is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
Offline text
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA.
Future of the project
As soon as I posted a picture of the project on Facebook, I already had two people interested in buying the machine. That happened in the first quarter of hour of "advertising" the product among my Facebook friends.
This is a motivational to work over some fixtures and changes the machine needs so that it can actually become a marketable product.
The machine was designed to be fabbable but there are some parts that might cost less if bought in stock, and that makes me think of launching it on a Kickstarter campaign. Of course it could as well be produced one at the time as the order are placed, but the price for single unit would be higher.
Anyway, the thing that I would like the most is to see people and Fab Labs using my open source and open hardware design to make their own machine. That's why I plan on building a spin-off website with all the documentation already on my Fab Academy website and add step by step instruction on how to make a machine, something that I could also put on Instructables.