Week 18:
Invention, Intellectual Property, & Business Models

Objective

Create and document a license for the final project. Develop a plan for dissemination.

LICENSE FOR BOTTOM UP: A PILLOW ALARM

This is a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license for Bottom Up: A Pillow Alarm:

About patents, copyright, and keeping innovation flowing

 Neil's lecture was interesting and inspiring, about how the law works simultaneously to defend and promote invention, and about how invention works in an ecosystem. He made an adroit progression from talking about ecosystems of innovation such as Cambridge, where jobs spawned from MIT grads create an economic output that is the world's 10th largest economy, to the idea of FabLabs being a way to distribute geographically the economic value of that ecosystem, so that it is not localized like Silicon Valley but is distributed in a network, and, with Neil talking simultaneously to a globe of people, and sharing his ideas, demonstrating his point about idea distribution by showing us by-the-by that we are in contact with a man who has 772 patents listed under his name!!!

 The conversation reminded me of Brian Eno's concept of "scenius" rather than genius, which I heard Eno talk about in his 2015 BBC John Peel lecture. And of course I thought about Lewis Hyde's lifetime of work supporting ways of giving and taking that foster creativity.

 Copyrights and patents are different. Patents are technical, you file them, they get reviewed and approved or disapproved. Copyrights are valid by simply declaring that they exist. They are usually for creative rather than technical work.

 Here is a review of a few open source copyright licenses ~ open source is different from free. Open source shares the code. Arduino is an example of how this can work: Arduino code is freely shared and leads to many individuals contributing to its development. People tend to buy the product, the board, and its peripherals. This is showing open source as a way of placing value on the benefits of the thing (its free development) rather than the thing itself (though that is the literal value: it is sold). Smart Citizen also derives its value from the ecosystem that it generates rather than the thing itself: the business potential is in the ecosystem.  ~ So, the licenses:

• Creative Commons is about preserving credit and promoting distribution. You sign up for, in effect, a limitation of the automatic copyright on original work. The purpose is to allow distribution among and collaboration with people you may never know or meet. See their good video that explains this at more length.
• GPL (General Public License). The mission of GNU's GPL is to allow users to freely change software.
  Taken from their preamble:
  "The GNU General Public License is a free, copyleft license for software and other kinds of works.
  The licenses for most software and other practical works are designed to take away your freedom to share and change the works. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change all versions of a program--to make sure it remains free software for all its users. We, the Free Software Foundation, use the GNU General Public License for most of our software; it applies also to any other work released this way by its authors. You can apply it to your programs, too.
  When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price. Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for them if you wish), that you receive source code or can get it if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs, and that you know you can do these things.
  To protect your rights, we need to prevent others from denying you these rights or asking you to surrender the rights. Therefore, you have certain responsibilities if you distribute copies of the software, or if you modify it: responsibilities to respect the freedom of others.
  For example, if you distribute copies of such a program, whether gratis or for a fee, you must pass on to the recipients the same freedoms that you received. You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the source code. And you must show them these terms so they know their rights.
  Developers that use the GNU GPL protect your rights with two steps: (1) assert copyright on the software, and (2) offer you this License giving you legal permission to copy, distribute and/or modify it."
• The BSD license comes from the Open Source Initiative in Palo Alto, which is a non-profit that patrols a standard for the use of the words "Open Source."
  Their mission: "Open source enables a development method for software that harnesses the power of distributed peer review and transparency of process. The promise of open source is higher quality, better reliability, greater flexibility, lower cost, and an end to predatory vendor lock-in."
• The MIT license is a very simple license applicable to software that simply requests a user to quote the source of the material.
  It states: "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."
• Apache License. The Apache Software Foundation is more exclusive than any of the above. The license is to protect the work of developers in a proven network. This is who they are and how they determine their network, from their website:
  "Established in 1999, the ASF is a US 501(c)(3) charitable organization, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors. Our all-volunteer board oversees more than 350 leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server -- the world's most popular Web server software.
  The ASF provides an established framework for intellectual property and financial contributions that simultaneously limits potential legal exposure for our project committers. Through the ASF's meritocratic process known as "The Apache Way," more than 500 individual Members and 4,500 Committers successfully collaborate to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation's official user conference, trainings, and expo.
  How did the ASF and Apache® projects grow?
  Formerly known as the Apache Group, the ASF was incorporated in 1999 as a membership-based, not-for-profit corporation in order to ensure that the Apache projects continue to exist beyond the participation of individual volunteers. Individuals who have demonstrated a commitment to collaborative open-source software development, through sustained participation and contributions within the Foundation's projects, are eligible for membership in the ASF. An individual is awarded membership after nomination and approval by a majority of the existing ASF members. Thus, the ASF is governed by the community it most directly serves -- the people collaborating within its projects."
• Fab Lab license. Simply acknowledgement of contribution, this license states:
  "(c) holder date
  This work may be reproduced, modified, distributed, performed, and displayed for any purpose, but must acknowledge "project name". Copyright is retained and must be preserved. The work is provided as is; no warranty is provided, and users accept all liability."
  Its goal is to leave room for commercialization while protecting the freedom to share the work.

About Income

 Here are some notes from Neil's lecture on this topic:

• Re: innovation, its drivers are vision (wanting to change something) and culture (wanting to create a place). Income is often a secondary benefit.
• Structurally, there are for-profit corporations, non-profit organizations that give tax credit to their donors, and hybrids like Mozilla. Non-profits can create income, but they distribute rather than accumulate it (in theory). Venture capitalism is useful for a project at a later stage. There are incubators, angel investing (friendly seed funding), friends and family, crowdsourcing, loans, and purchase commitments (like Kickstarter). You can bootstrap, meaning selling a little, growing, and selling more.
• Lifecycle of a business plan ~ or, rather, ways of demise:
• failure of business plan ~ the plan is usually wrong; be agile
• need for management team ~ wrong person often ends up trying to develop; usually it shouldn't be the inventor
• problems in scaling ~between 10ppl and 100ppl ~ at around 50 ppl ~ new elements need to be addressed in a business: theft or sexual harassment or other messy problems that need legal and HR
• pressure for exit ~ more pressure to exit at a time not determined by you if you take on outside funding and the investors want to sell and turn a profit

Accelerator, Incubator, Manufacturer

  There's a pivot that big manufacturers are trying to seize whereby they can charge more for small-batch production. Here are some pretty cool orgs that accelerate / incubate ... Neat projects linked.

• PCH, Highway 1
• Flextronics, Flex
• Dragon, Bolt
• SEEED, HAX
• Factory For All
• Fab Lab Made

A future Fab Lab trademark?

Possible futures and distribution channels for my Pillow Alarm

It would be exciting if this were a project that could grow. In offices all over Barcelona, the seat cushions / pillow alarms would synchronize over the internet and cause a discombobulated stadium wave to break within the office buildings of the city, of the world ...

Seeing the work of the company Rompa has inspired me to think the Pillow Alarm could have a practical use for autistic people challenged with a need for physical stimulation.

The Pillow Alarm could also be handy to wake up one part of a sleeping couple who has to go off to work early.

I will use a Creative Commons license for Bottom Up: Pillow Alarm, because I would be excited if this work were taken up, tweaked, and used by people who might be interested. I am not defensive about it because information about it will be, for now, in the Fab network, so I am not worried about any serious perversion of the ideas here. The idea of a vibrating pillow is not unique, so if others build on the platform, all the better.

Recitation: Carl Bass of Autodesk

Friendly and lovely mechanically intelligent fellow. The question part at the end is often the most interesting, as was true today. Here are some notes:

• Neil says: Fab 2.0, where FabLabs build FabLabs.
• Neil: manufacturing, code, and production as separate operations right now, but need to be integrated. He asks Carl how he's dealing with that.
  Carl answers, 123D circuits and Fusion, so you can simulate electromechanical devices as well as design all the parts together.
• Neil: Object-oriented hardware, modular all the way down ~ more sophisticated than machines that make machines. Need for rapid-prototyping of software as well.
• ON ARTISTS:
  
  • Neil: Haystack artists "blew apart the workflow." So, I think, maybe it's not about the workflow, over which I've been obsessing ...
  • Carl: Pier 9 artists' residency. Artists don't even break the rules, they don't even pay attention to the rules. NB: This is clearly how artists are valuable ...
  • Pier 9 is one pier over from the Exploratorium.
  • Scale: Pier 9 is more on the product design scale, whereas the Boston complex is on the urban design / architectural scale.
• Neil: How do you think about exponential complexity?
  Carl: Dreamcatcher, software that works toward a solution. Before you know if you've solved the problem, you're doing low-level geometry. Working on the wrong level of abstraction. Autodesk is working to give people solutions on the right side of the solving ...
• Re: Fab City, Carl says ~ we want to give people the tools to evaluate their design choices on a systems level. For instance, if I rotated my building, how would that affect energy use? Many people can't answer that.
• Neil: For Fab Academy, using the network as a campus. Problem with accreditation. They "invented" a geography to attach to (Cambridge, I assume). However, the accreditation is based on skills received rather than institution received from.
• Re: big picture ~
  Carl: Leave room for people to do actual work.
  Neil: UN General Assembly sustainable development goals rely on digital fabrication ~ Beno Juarez showed them this and created the ah-ha about this, that small-scale digital fabrication is involved at every level of future job creation ~ I know, too, Neil is certain about the innovation and job-making caused by the Cambridge scene and, too, hence, thus, and concurrently, the digital revolution.