The assignment for this week is to develop a plan for dissemination of my final project.
I will document the following:
I listened to the lecture by Neil and gave much thought about how I wanted my creative endeavors to be disseminated after my project was finished. I decided to look at the Creative Commons licenses to determine the best course of action in the use of my ideas. I visited the Licenses page on the Creative Commons website and read through each license and the Attributions each license held along with the Commercial and Derivatives use. I thought about my final project and built upon what others have done and want someone else to improve upon what I am doing and not profit off of it but share and be able to replicate it if they would like to.
I also looked very closely at commercial license options. This would provide me a monetary compensation from my intellectual invention. I read through the MIT Office of Sponsored Programs
Intellectual Property page and the
Tufts Tech Transfer licensing process page. I liked the process of how they spelled
out the procedure for licensing your work and the patents you would acquire. It read through the various financial and other benefits received from a commercial
license, but don't feel as if my creation would be something to be commercialized. I like the the open source process of someone else building upon my work and improving
it for the benefit of themselves or others without financially profitting off of my work. I could opt for the Commercial, Non-Exclusive, Royalty Free, Non-Sublicensable License and no royalties would be
required. This does not seem as straightforward as the Creative Commons licensing agreeement.
I wanted to compare the most restrictive and least restrictive licensing from Creative Commons. The least restrictive license would be the CC0. This allows for owners of copyright content to waive those and place them into the public domain. You can apply the CC0 to your own work but you cannot change your mind later. This would grant the public unconditional royalty free use of your work.
The most restrictive Creative Commons license would be the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported. (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) As opposed to the CC0, you must provide appropriate credit, provide a link to the license and indicate if changes were made. You cannot use it for a commerical purpose. If you remix, transform, or build upon the idea you cant distribute it.
I decided to choose the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license. It falls between the two licenses described above. This allows others to build upon my work non-commercially, and must acknowledge my contributions and cannot deviate on the same terms. I really want others to improve and make my project better. There are several versions of my project commercially available so I am not that concerned about someone taking my project and making a profit, but this will give some protection.
The summary of the license I chose from Creative Commons.
My Creative Commons Licensing:
I also plan on using the MIT permission model: (c)Matthew L. Gerber 2016 Permission granted for experimental and personal use. License for commercial sale available from Matthew L. Gerber.
I don't plan on disseminating my final project past our school and any other FabLab that would want a counter over their entrance. I am planning on putting it up over our door in our lab to count people as they enter and exit our facility. If someone would want to build their own people counter, I would freely give my time to help them or point them to my project page for them to create this for their lab. I will update my page if any changes or improvements are made.