Invention, Intellectual Property, and Buisness Model

Creative Commons

I usually use an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License for all of my projects. I like to share my designs and ideas with others and I have no problem with people building up on my original idea or adapting it to their purpose. However I still like to get credit for my ideas and I also want that people find me me when they like my designs and maybe start collaborating with me in future projects. But I do not like when others make money with my ideas and designs, without asking me for it or letting me participate. I also want to push the availability of free designs and ideas such that everyone can use them and participate in the FabLab community.

Patent

The Idea behind patents is pretty basic. You can report your design to your goverment, they record it and register it as your design. When someone else now users your design you can charge them or drag them to court. However in the reality this systems does not work as good as it is supposed to work, or at least not for small inventors. Big companies have gathere big piles of patents to basically be safe from other companies, like in a cold war of patents. And if a small inventor wants to defend his patent agains bigger companies it is usually hopeless because the court fees and payments for lawyers can get drastically huge. Also the system supports a new movement of buisness which buys patents and then afterwards tries to collect money from everyone who has infringed it in the past. Else the are threatening you with their lawyers.

Dissemination of a final project.

Two good source to get your own project into the public are usually Thingiverse and Instructables. Those are two big communities with a loot of users who share their projects. You also can get good inspirations from there or get help or feedback to your current project. Also you can get good inspirations from there or a cool idea for a small weekend project.

Another community which most of us are familiar with is the Fablab Community. If you have a cool project you need help with or you want to show other makers your newest project, then go to your local fablab. You will usually find nice and helpful people there.

The next thing where you can show your project are the Maker Faires which are . . . well faires for makers ;)
You can usually find a bunch of people willing to try out new stuff there or see awesome projects in action.