Skip to content

19. Invention, IP & income

This week, I learnt about Intellectual Property and Licenses, and decided how I’ll be sharing the work.

Goals for this week:
- Develop a plan for dissemination of my final project.
- Prepare drafts of my summary slide (presentation.png, 1920x1080) and video clip (presentation.mp4, 1080p HTML5, < ~minute, < ~25 MB) and put them in my website's root directory

About Intellectual Property Law

This week’s lecture was one of the key reasons for changing my Final Project.
Typically, once your idea is publically disclosed before filing your patent application, it is considered “loss of novelty” and can no longer be patented.
There is a useful system called “Provisionals” in the US, which is a temporary and lower-cost application that establishes an early filing date for an invention. We do also have a similar (although not as simple) concept in Japan, but the cost and paperwork associated with it was more than I could handle before cut-off date, so I decided to find an alternative Final Project for FabAcademy.

Licensing

Since I don’t have plans of commercialising this Tester, and since I need to make all the design files publically accessible on the web, I will be licensing this under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0).
This allows anybody to copy my work for non-commercial means, as long as they give appropriate credit to me and share their adaptations under the same license.

alt text
Midori’s Mystery Tester © 2025 by Midori Kurokawa
is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Please do reach out if you are reading this and decide to design a new connector using this equipment!

Dissemination of this Final Project

For the moment, I only plan to use this equipment for my private use, especially to develop what was my original Final Project. Eventually, when I manage to complete the original project, perhaps it will play a useful role in convincing investors of its possibility. Also, perhaps one day I can crowd-source other people’s connector ideas and test them on this machine.

Assessment Checklist:

  • Created a dissemination plan for my final project
  • Outlined future possibilities and described how to make them probabilities
  • Uploaded a draft summary slide and video in the correct resolution and format
  • Checked my slide and video are accessible from my website