14. Invention, intellectual property and income

This week I worked on defining my final project idea and started to getting used to the documentation process.

This weeks Assignment:

  • Develop a plan for dissemination of your final project.
  • prepare drafts of your summary slide (presentation.png, 1920x1080), video clip (presentation.mp4, 1080p HTML5, < ~minute, < ~10 MB) and put them in your root directory.

  • For this weeks assignment I started by giving the importance of copyrighting and licensing to protect your work and why are copyright laws are also important?

  • At first, I selected this meaningful quote about copyrighting. 

    The most important thing about intellectual property vs. creative expression is that copyright law was created not to stifle creativity but to encourage creativity. 
                                             Shepard Fairey

Why Are Copyright Laws Important?

  • There are numerous benefits of copyright protection. When an individual creates a new work, such as a poem, book, painting or photograph, it is copyright law that helps protect his ownership of that work. The purpose of copyright is to help clarify who has ownership of that work. Copyright treats creative works as a specific form of property known as intellectual property,However, unlike private property, copyright ownership is for a limited duration and eventually expires.

What is intellectual property in simple words?

  • Intellectual property (IP) refers to the ownership of an idea or design by the person who came up with it. It is a term used in property law. It gives a person certain exclusive rights to a distinct type of creative design, meaning that nobody else can copy or reuse that creation without the owner’s permission.

Some examples of intellectual property:

  • Patents. Patents are granted for new, useful inventions, and they will give you the right to prevent others from making, using, or selling your invention.
  • Trade secrets.
  • Trademarks.
  • Copyrights.
  • Patents.
  • Trade secrets.
  • Trademarks.
  • Copyrights.

What is the difference between intellectual property and copyright?

  • Intellectual property is protected by laws specific to the expression of an idea. Copyright is the law specific to the expression of ideas in visual or audio form. Unlike a trademark that indicates a specific item or design is protected, copyright covers a different expression of thought.

What is the difference between innovation and invention?

The words invention and innovation overlap semantically but are really quite distinct.

  • Invention can refer to a type of musical composition, a falsehood, a discovery, or any product of the imagination. The sense of invention most likely to be confused with innovation is “a device, contrivance, or process originated after study and experiment,” usually something which has not previously been in existence.

  • Innovation, for its part, can refer to something new or to a change made to an existing product, idea, or field. One might say that the first telephone was an invention, the first cellular telephone either an invention or an innovation, and the first smartphone an innovation.

What is open source license?

  • Open source licenses are licenses that comply with the Open Source Definition — in brief, they allow software to be freely used, modified, and shared. To be approved by the Open Source Initiative (also known as the OSI), a license must go through the Open Source Initiative’s license review process.

Common & Popular OSS Licenses:

  • MIT License

  • MIT is one of the most permissive licenses. It is also the most popular one. It offers very low protection for the author of the software.

    • The source code doesn’t need to be public when a distribution of the software is made.
    • Modifications to the software can be release under any license.
    • Changes made to the source code may not be documented.
    • It offers no explicit position on patent usage.

  • Apache License 2.0

  • Apache License 2.0 offers more flexibility to the users.

    • The source code doesn’t need to be public when a distribution of the software is made.
    • Modifications to the software can be release under any license.
    • Changes made to the source code must be documented.
    • It offers the same patent usage protection as GPLv3.
    • It explicitly prohibits the use of trademarked names found in the project.

  • Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD)

  • BSD has two main versions: 2-clause and 3-clause. They both offer more flexibility to the users than the Apache License 2.0.

    • The source code doesn’t need to be public when a distribution of the software is made.
    • Modifications to the software can be release under any license.
    • Changes made to the source code may not be documented.
    • It offers no explicit position on patent usage.
    • The license and copyright notice must be included in the documentation of the compiled version of the source code (as opposed to only in the source code).
    • The BSD 3-clause states that the names of the author and contributors can’t be used to promote products derived from the software without permission.

  • GNU General Public License, version 3 (GPLv3)

  • GPLv3 is one of the most restrictive licenses. It offers high protection for the author of the software.

    • The source code must be made public whenever a distribution of the software is made.
    • Modifications of the software must be released under the same license.
    • Changes made to the source code must be documented.
    • If patented material was used in the creation of the software, it grants the right for users to use it. If the user sues anyone over the use of the patented material, they lose the right to use the software.

  • After going through the different open source licenses and understanding the importance of protecting your work, I chose a creative common license to protect my work. After that I discovered the different CC copyright licenses.

  • What does Creative Commons (CC) license mean:

  • Creative Commons (CC) license is an internationally active non-profit organisation that provides free licences for creators to use when making their work available to the public. These licences help the creator to give permission for others to use the work in advance under certain conditions. IT enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted “work”. A CC license is used when an author wants to give other people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that they (the author) have created.

  • Creative Commons offers six copyright licenses:

  • Attribution (CC BY)

  • Attribution ShareAlike (CC BY-SA)
  • Attribution-NoDerivs (CC BY-ND)
  • Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC)
  • Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA)
  • Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND)

  • After I understood each of CC copyright licenses I come with the decision to choose ” Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) ” as a specific CRL for my fabacademy project.

Below are the steps I used to create my CC copyright license.