Week 18: Invention, intellectual property and income
Licenses
When I'm teaching Scratch to kids, eventually they will ask for including sound in their projects. All of them thinking of their favourite radio-formula song. Which opens a topic about licensing that turns very interesting. I point that their favourite artist won't let them use their music for their project without asking for permission, it is true that they probably won't be prosecuted nor receive a "cease and desist" letter from the artist company, but in any case, it's something illegal. That leads us to sites like jamendo.com and lets me explain the difference of using licensed music for commercial or non-commercial purposes.
Usually people think of Creative Commons (CC) licenses for their works, not realising that even when CC licenses are good for hardware, they may not be best for software. And it is common that you build the software on top of other code, being that programs or libraries. And if you do that, you have to respect the original license which usually asks you to publish everything you do with the use of that library to have the same license.
You can use a license for all kinds of intellectual property, meaning that you can license from music, video, writing, software, hardware and more. In the end, it's all about setting how you want others to use your hours of work, but each intellectual property has its own particularities. And I think there are 3 main groups, software, hardware and multimedia (audio, video, and text), and with a big difference between hardware and the rest, because for replication one has to have not only a support (computer, tv, music player...) but the materials and tools itself. If I want to use open source software is just about using it with a compatible system, if I want to build a laser cutter I actually need to get the parts, probably manufacture some other parts.
A good point to start is The Open Source initiative that has a list of open source licenses. So for this project I'll probably choose one of the available Creative Commons license. All CC licenses include "attribution", meaning that anyone using your work or (if you allow it) its derivatives, must credit the original author, this is also known as "BY" when written. But there are two things to think about when choosing a CC license.
The first one is if you'd like your work to be modified in any way, what is call a derivative. You can just say no, and allow others to use it "as is", this has, in my opinion, more sense when licensing multimedia work, as you may not want what you have made. This is represented as an equal sign. But with software and hardware I think that makes no sense to stop people to get your design better or adapted to their needs. With the CC license you can also specify whether you allow derivatives not to be licensed by a CC license (or compatible license) or if you want those derivatives to be licensed the same way that your work is . This is what a "share-alike" (SA for short) means. If do not allow others to make derivatives, it's not really an open-source license.
The second one is if you allow commercial use of it or not. If you allow it, means that is ok if other people make money directly or indirectly from your work. I obviously don't care if anyone would be able to make money from this experimental project, but if anyone can do it, I'll be happy to allow it. In any case, if you go for a non-commercial (NC) license
IMPORTANT: this doesn't mean that it will stop Chinese factories to make it!!!
So after deciding that I have a license for the SoundFlower:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
In the end, don't forget that this button only represents what you want people to do with your work, backed by a legal text but it won't magically be respected, and that's the difficult part, to be able to enforce your license.
Future opportunities
I'm not really dreaming with this project. It's not the kind of project aimed for becoming a widespread product but a project demonstrating composite capabilities around the geometry of a parabola mixed with the composites technique that I found so interesting. In any case, dreaming of future possibilities, I see this becoming the result of a workshop on digital fabrication and audio.