Muhammad Asim Samejo

Invention, Intellectual Property, and Income

This week deviates from the technical stuff and puts into perspect the non-technical but (equally if not less) important aspects of the design, business plan and commercialization . The task of this assignment is to:

1. develop a plan for dissemination of your final project
2. prepare a summary slide (presentation.png, 1280x1024) and video clip (presentation.mp4, 1080p HTML5, < ~minute, < ~10 MB) in your root directory

The product which I have managed to design and produce during the Fab Lab course is a very basic prototype which serves to as a proof of concept. During the design process I have learned many things through experience and I am sure that subsequent designs will be robust, diverse and cost-effective.

Business Plan

The objective of the final project is to design a wall sized clock, which displays time (albeit with limited resolution) as well as serve the purpopse of lighting up otherwise dull outdoors.

At the moment I dont see any commercial value in this project. However, I would like to install some of these clocks in large indoor spaces and outdoors such as hospitals, railway stations, bus stands and educational institutes.

I would be hoping to caputure imagination of potential customers and public alike. I will be offering to install such clocks to interested clients at a minimal cost and would offer repair and maintenance at additional charges.

Liecense

During Prof. Niel's lecture I came to know about several different intellectual property liecense models namely the creativecommons, MIT liecense and the FabLab liencense etc etc. I didn't have enough time to sift through the fine details of these models however the crux of these license agreements are:

1. The Creative Commons copyright licenses and tools forge a balance inside the traditional "all rights reserved" setting that copyright law creates. These tools provide a simple, standardized way to grant copyright permissions to creative work. The combination of these tools and our users is a vast and growing digital commons, a pool of content that can be copied, distributed, edited, remixed, and built upon, all within the boundaries of copyright law.

2.The MIT liecense (reproduced below)

Copyright <YEAR> <COPYRIGHT HOLDER>

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.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

3. Fab Academy Liecense is another simple yet effective liecense agreement (reproduced below)

(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.

I intend to share the electrical circuits , 3D design and source code of the project under a "Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International" licence. This is a common liecense model used by several individuals allowing others to freely use, modifiy, add value to the orginal design and citing the original work.

The reason for the choice of this model of liesence are as followings:

1. Most of the programs which I have used in this project have been taken from either professor Niel's lecture materials, current and past students.
2. No real technical/scientific breakthroughs have been made to claim intellectual property rights.
3. As I have found help on several issues through the design of this system I feel that I should contribute back to the community.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

Copyright © 2017 Muhammad Asim Ali