18. Invention, Intellectual Property, and Income

This week I worked on determining which license to use for my final project and how it could be distributed.

Requirements

• Develop a plan for dissemination of your final project

• Prepare drafts of your summary slide (presentation.png, 1920x1080) and video clip (presentation.mp4, 1080p HTML5, < ~minute, < ~10 MB) and put them in your root directory.

Licensing

The goal of formalizing the license to be used was that it would dictate how others were to redistribute, use, and credit my project. To figure out the types of licenses I could use, I asked ChatGPT to list out several licenses, which included different types of the Creative Commons License 4.0 and the MIT License. There were several aspects that could be applied to the Creative Commons License under different abbreviations, which included BY, SA, ND, and NC. BY meant Attribution, allowing others to create off the original work in almost any way, as long as credit is provided to the original creation. SA stands for ShareAlike and means that any derivations or new creations must be licensed under the same terms. ND means No Derivations, allowing for redistribution in either commericial or non-commercial ways with credit to the author. NC means Non Commericial, and it lets others remix, adapt, and build upon the work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge the original author and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.

The MIT License is an open-source software license, allowing for permission to use the software in any way, provided that there is attribution to the original author in any substantial portion of a copy.

For my project, I seek to allow people redistribute it publicly, and seeing as it is a relatively bland idea overall, I thought that it would be alright to allow others to profit off it. As such, I decided to go with the CC BY-SA 4.0. Details for it can be found here.

Dissemination Plan

If this project grew in scope and became more professional, I plan to distribute my project to not just skiers and snowboarders, but other outdoor activities that could require navigation capabilities. It would mainly be limited to the US, however, as the physical and temperature conditions involved with an international shipping process could ruin the helmet.

This helmet could benefit thsoe who struggle with directions, or people who happen to have gotten lost in a forest and require a way out. For skiers and snowboarders, the target audience of the original idea, this project could be used to add a layer of interactivity and knowledge to skiing and snowboarding by providing interesting and useful information as they go down the slopes of a mountain. The additional use case of becoming lost could also apply to some situations, as the orientation aspect could assist during “white-outs”, where wind and snow greatly reduce visibility, meaning that knowing where you are going becomes very important.

Video and Slide

To upload a draft of either the slide or video, I just labled files as “presentation.(file type)” within the docs folder of my repo.