Invention, Intellectual Property and Business Models

This week is 90% working on my final project, and 10% homework for this week. I’m definitely not finished yet but making progress! We will present on Friday June 9th, so I’m definitely feeling the heat.

Assignments

Dissemination plan

The project is documented on my project development page. This is the main page for my ‘target group’ of fellow Fabacademy students and other makers interested in my project.

Who is your project for?

It is for people interested in collaborating with machines to create something: so I guess mostly other makers and designers. I’m making this installation because I think it’s cool and it has many facets for me to build on and to learn from. It’s not a very polished or useful machine which is exactly what I want.

I went in the painting robot direction because of a project at Waag that I’ll work on after Fabacademy called Tracks4Crafts. I hope that this machine can be a tool for exploration on craft and technology within that context. If not, I will still explore it myself as it’s exactly that intersection that interests me the most.

How is it funded? How would you fund scaling up?

It’s currently not funded: I’m using materials in the fablab, so I guess it’s funded by my tuition. I do want to continue working on iterations and new versions, so then I would have to either fund it myself or write a project proposal to get funding. In the Netherlands there are a couple of foundations to support artists and designers with funding of their project, so I can look into that (especially the Creative Industries Fund).

Is there a license you chose or something else to protect intellectual properties of your project?

This project is licensed under the Creative Commons license Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). I chose this license, because I don’t mind others learning from my process, as long as I’m credited when parts of my project are built upon.

What this means (from the Creative Commons website):

You are free to:

    Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format
    Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material

    The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms.

Under the following terms:

    Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.

    NonCommercial — You may not use the material for commercial purposes.

    ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.

    No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

Notices:

    You do not have to comply with the license for elements of the material in the public domain or where your use is permitted by an applicable exception or limitation.
    No warranties are given. The license may not give you all of the permissions necessary for your intended use. For example, other rights such as publicity, privacy, or moral rights may limit how you use the material.

The full legal text can be found here.

Is there a business plan?

No. It’s not a project I want to build a business around. I would like to exhibit it though so I’m going to ask and look around for events that come up where it would fit. I’ve done exhibitions in the past with other tactile and interactive experimental works so I’m sure I can find a place for it!

Poster & video

My current poster:

And video:

Video notes

The video has to show:

• what it does
• how it does what it does
• what enabled that
• has to show functionality
• how it works

Lecture notes

• Fabacademy network as an ecosystem/network to push and pull with each other, learn and inspire each other to create a fertile space for invention and innovation
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prior_art
• Disclosure, provisional
• I don’t like patents
• They also don’t offer you any protection
• Copyright is for creative works
• Open source vs free:
  • Open source doesn’t mean no money
• Licenses: creative commons, gpl, MIT