19. Invention, intellectual property and income¶
1. Invention¶
Inventions are the bedrock of innovation. An invention is a new solution to a technical problem and can be protected through patents. Patents protect the interests of inventors whose technologies are truly groundbreaking and commercially successful, by ensuring that an inventor can control the commercial use of their invention.
2. Intellectual Properties¶
To protect your idea so that someone else cannot steal your idea, you need to secure one or more of the four different types of intellectual property (IP).
A. Trade Secrets
B. Trademarks
C. patents
D. Copyrights
Protection by each Intellectual Property:The table below illustrates each of the four different types of intellectual properties and what they might be used to protect in a broader sense.
A. Trade Secrets¶
A “trade secret” is any valuable information that is not publicly known and of which the owner has taken “reasonable” steps to maintain secrecy. These include information, such as a business plans, customer lists, ideas related to your research and development cycle, etc.
Trade secret protection may be optimal and sufficient for ideas and inventions that can be used secretly and therefore could not be reverse engineered (e.g. recipes).
B. Trademarks¶
Trademarks protect brands. The name of the product associated with the product or a service is called the trademark. A trademark is anything by which customers can identify a product or the source of a product, such as a name associated with the product.
C. Patents¶
An individual or company that holds a patent has the right to prevent others from making, selling, retailing, or importing that technology. This creates opportunities for inventors to sell, trade or license their patented technologies with others who may want to use them.
A patent can last up to 20 years, but the patent holder usually has to pay certain fees periodically throughout that 20-year period for the patent to remain valid. In practice, this means that if a technology has limited commercial value, the patent holder may decide to abandon the patent, at which point the technology falls into the public domain and may be freely used.
D. Copyrights¶
A copyright grants its holder the right to control the production and use of creative works. Copyright law does not apply to facts and ideas. Instead, it protects the representation of facts and ideas. Works that are still intangible and not rendered onto a physical medium are just ideas and therefore not entitled to copyright protection.
i. Open Source License: Open source license is that allows the source code or design to be used, shared or modified under defined terms and conditions. Open-source licensed product is mostly free of cost. The most common open source licenses available are MIT license, Apache license and GNU GPLv3 license. a. MIT license:- The MIT License is a permissive license that is short and to the point. Licensed works, modifications, and larger works may be distributed under different terms and without source code.
b. Apache license:- A permissive license whose main conditions require preservation of copyright and license notices. Contributors provide an express grant of patent rights. Licensed works, modifications, and larger works may be distributed under different terms and without source code.
c. GNU GPLv3:- Permissions of this strong copyleft license are conditioned on making available complete source code of licensed works and modifications, which include larger works using a licensed work, under the same license. Copyright and license notices must be preserved.
d. Creative Commons: 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.
ii. Comparison between the license:
3. Creative Commons¶
I compared and finalised to go with Creative Commons open source license for my project.
A. Website: Opened the Creative Commons website for license and allowed adaptation for my work to be shared.
B.Commercial Use: Didn’t allow the commercial use of my project work and it showed selected license- “Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International”.
C. Details: Filled the details with my name, project name and the website link for the license to be more specific.
D. Code: I got the code which I can paste in my website for the visitors to know. Chose normal icon on license which is bigger and more clear to me.
4. Future Plans & Business Model¶
My project has been deploed at Azolla Polyhouse, Vigyan Ashram. This will give me the feedback of the functioning, accuracy and durability of the device. My main target is to make a “pest predictor.” So, I will not commercialise this model. Rather, make one more device and install it in other fields to collect more data of pests in specific atmospheric conditions.
I will commercialise “Pest Predctor” which is the next model of “Weather Eye”. It will be greatly useful to the farmers.