Week 17

Assignment for the 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. I have to
-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 sourcing

I decided to start by learning and understanding more about licensing, Intellectual property, trademarks, etc. I do have previous experience with copyrighting and trademarking, but this helped me explore everything in detail.

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:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. Franchise

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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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 Initiative 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

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 persons 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.

Project Management

I decided to start with my final project works and do it with a schedule. I am using Trello to manage my project and tasks in hand.
Trello is a web-based, Kanban-style, list-making application and is a subsidiary of Atlassian. Originally created by Fog Creek Software in 2011, it was spun out to form the basis of a separate company in 2014 and later sold to Atlassian in January 2017. The company is based in New York City.

Dissemination Plan

Market Opportunities

The product can be made available in offices, schools, colleges and any buildings. The current products in the market does not incorporate all the features together while there are other features like automatic garbage disposal bag changing etc. Considering small spaces like individual office cabins and classrooms, such facilities are not required. So with all the required features, the trashcan would also be a good design upgrade to rooms. Mass production will further reduce the cost of individual trashcan making smart facilities available for affordable prices.

Future plans for the project include

-Controlling trashcan using virtual assistants like Google Assistant, Alexa, etc
-Screen display of filled trashcans in the janitor's room
-Test product in public places and check practicality

Licensing My Project

I decided to license it under the creative commons as it seemed perfect for my work. 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.

The license for my final project is shown below.

HEX+ by Alfia M is licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International

Preparing Slide

For preparing slide, I used Adobe Illustrator and used an art board of size 1920*1080. I put all the required details, including components, processes, applications as well as images and license logo. I then placed the file in the root directory and pushed it.

Preparing video

For preparing the video, I was initially planning to use iMovies on my laptop, but since I had all the video clips on my phone, I decided to make the video using Inshot.

Once the video was done, the video size was over 110 MB so I had to compress it. I used an online took called VEED.IO to compress my video. The, I placed the video on the root directory and pushed it to Git.