Create and document a license for your final project

General Definition

With the words intellectual property we generally refer to inventions, related to a process from our minds, researches and experiments. It concerns literary and artistic works, designs, symbols, names and images used in commerce. Patents, copyright and trademarks are an example of means used by law to protect the IP, enabling people to earn recognition or financial benefit from what they invent or create.

Other types of IP

Reading about IP and copyright, I have also read about Copyleft (more related to software), which name is a funny reference to copyright. Copyleft concept was introduced for the first time by the agreement between Symbolics and Richard Stallman to protect and manage the Lisp project. Then, Stallman created a specific license, the General Public License (GNU), first copyleft license. With this license, the owner can have the possibility to maintain his rights along all the users of his project, regardless all the changes made by users.

Copyleft has 4 freedoms:

Freedom 0 = The user can use the software for any purpose.

Freedom 1 = The user can study and modify the software.

Freedom 2 = The user can spread the software in order to help next users.

Freedom 3 = The user can modify the software and spread it in order to help next users.

CC - CREATIVE COMMON LICENSE

With this term we refers to IP license available since 16/12/2002 by Creative Commons (CC), which is a no-profit organization from USA, created by Lawrence Lessig in 2001. These licences are in halfway between copyright and public domain. On one side we have a full protection (all rights reserved), while on the other side we have no right reserved. So, CC license can guarantee some rights reserved, leaving to the author the conditions.

CC Freedoms are 2:

1. To Share = freedom to copy and to share the project.
2. To Remix = freedom to copy and to modify the project.

CC conditions are 4:

1. BY-Attribution = freedom to copy, modify and to share the project, highlighting the name of original author.
2. NC-Non-Commercial = freedom to copy, modify and to share the project, only for non-commercial purposes, highlighting the name of original author.
3. ND-No Derivate Works = freedom to copy and to share the project, highlighting the name of original author without producing any derivates.
4. SA-Share-Alike = freedom to copy and to share the project, keeping the same license conditions

WHAT IS MY FINAL PROJECT LICENSE?

About my final project protection, I want to adopte a Non-Commercial CC license. Since my project is an experiment and it needs a lot of improvements, I would like that other professionist who are interested in can improve the project. Anyway I would not like if someone could take the project and use it as a source of profit. For that reason I will upload all the files (dwg, animations, video, gh definitions, 3d models, stl), hoping someone will be interested and give his/her support to improve and continue this project.
About income, I am not intended to gain any profit from this project. I just hope to find interested people, share thoughts and improvements and continue this project.

To make my CC license I went to CC website and selected the conditions.