May 21st 2014: Invention, Intellectual Property and Income
The discussion today focused on Possibilities for how to protect
intellectual property.
Homework:
Develop a plan for dissemination of your final project.
My Plan:
I don't trust patents and since I've already released these
webpages chronicling how to make my final project, it wouldn't really
be patentable anyway.
I always work under two main theories.
- If it is a good idea, keep it a trade secret and shut up about
it. Trade secrets are protected under US law, and you don't have to
tell the whole world you ideas. Patents are relatively dumb for a
few reasons.
- You literally have to explain to the whole world how your thing
works and how they can copy it. There are unscrupulous people in
the world who will take that idea and run with it. Then it would
be up to you to find them, and litigate against them. All the
while other companies could be stealing your ideas and getting
away with it. You will quickly go broke fighting the lawsuits
unless you are a supermassive company.
- You must patent your idea in every country in the world, then
keep an eye out for patent thieves
- Patents can cost thousands of dollars. I've seen recent
estimates of $7-10k depending on the patent attorney for the whole
process. I can't afford to waste my money that way (maybe I
should go to law school and become a patent attorney though...
hmm.....)
- If another supermassive company does patent something and can
successfully stop others from copying their ideas, then they can
prevent useful technologies from helping the human race. That's
the whole reason to develop things to begin with!!! This upsets
me because in some cases, people die or suffer needlessly because
some fat-cat or patent troll is preventing dissemination of useful
and good technologies and ideas.
- I release anything not important enough to keep as a trade secret
as open source. This way, people can benefit from me in some way and
they can be satisfied with the fact that I'm giving them something
at least (unlike if I were to patent everything).
So along that
vein, my plan for dissemination is to:
- Release all the software and hardware designs on my final project
under GPL2. (Even though GPL is the herpes of software licenses...)
- Mirror this set of webpages on my own servers to make them easy to
find online and in our FabLab
- Share my work everywhere online. I've already been sharing my
videos and webpages on social networks and I plan to continue to do
so.
- Additionally, I think that creating this as a kit (I do own two
companies that are exactly in that realm) is easily possible for an
organization, even for something loosely organized such as a
hackerspace. As for a company, the initial costs are so low per
unit that it would be very easy to pull together funds for a small
order of a couple hundred for selling on the internet or at craft
shows. This can be done internally (without the need of a load).
For much larger orders, a presale method is a good low risk
method for raising enough money for larger orders without risking
holding a lot of dead stock (dead fish syndrome... Imagine you had a
warehouse full of fish. If you don't sell them fast, you'll likely
never sell them and you'll be stuck in a stinky situation). large
order presales can be done either traditionally with a sign-up on a
webpage, or through a crowd-funding network such as Kickstarter
or Indigogo. Laser
cutting a large number of these hands is not feasible, so some of
the crowdfunding money would certainly go to making a die for
stamping the hands out. That's not very expensive, but would be a
required next step.
I don't think there would be any particular tasks that
would require experts in any field (except fabrication of the cutting
die of course).
