Invention, Intellectual Property, and Income
The word is not that unfamiliar to me as I am a person who is pro open-source and believe firmly in the philosophy. Even then I never had the patience or courage to go through the whole licensing part of my works. I always like to give my projects the “Creative commons” license siting the following points
and these were also done by just following others who do the same. I never thought about the liabilities I have to bear by giving out my work. Now is the time for diving deep into the topic. The views I share here are inclined towards IP rights in the field of technology.
A swift glance into the matter landed me face on to “Intellectual Property” or simply IP. From what I have learned, it is a topic of discussion for centuries, with various changes according to the period of discussion. It is now legalized as Intellectual property rights(IPRs). It gives the owner of the IP a monopoly over the intellect. The IPRs give protection to creators on trademarks, copyright, patents, industrial design rights, and in some jurisdictions it extends to even trade secrets.
Patent is the part which grants the owner/inventor a set of rights on ownership for a limited amount of time in exchange for public disclosure of details about the invention. Trademark is protection of any kind of design or symbol or even design elements that is recognizable to an IP for a limited time. One should think of brand images, logos etc when you hear about trademark. Copyright is the protection of original work of a creator. It goes protection from duplication, use and distribution. This generally apply to forms of art/creative works. In my country(India) even software can be only copyrighted and not patented.
The whole point I believe in having IP ownership by a sole entity is to have financial benefits. The owner will be paid for the use of their IP in any forms which should be very tempting for many. But for the future and progress or improvement of the technology I think the openness or share alike practice is better. The pile(sometimes it is!) of money we have to pay for a crucial bit of information is in my view is inhumane and unacceptable. The happy thing is that there are already groups/individuals who stands for the same cause. Re-inventing the wheel is what happens when some technology or method is not given access to. Do you think that is what we need ??
I embrace the Open source philosophy in the scientific domain and will stick on to it for the rest of life. Lets delve into some of the Licenses which comply to it. Here is a list of some of them
Here I will discuss about the MIT License and the Creative commons.
MIT License
It is easy to comprehend compared to many other licenses. It has very limited restriction over reuse of the code. It is also compatible to many of the existing commonly used licenses like GPL and many other copyleft licenses. The license comes under the category of permissive licenses, which defined as "lets people do anything they want with your code as long as they provide attribution back to you and don’t hold you liable”. That is pretty enough for our needs now. It states more clearly what all right are vested upon the end user which in my opinion is great. Its ease of use and effectiveness has convinced me to use the same for my entire work dine during Fab Academy.
The literature of the license is as follows
Copyright (c) <year> <copyright holders>
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.
Creative Commons
This was formulated primarily for sharing creative contents by creators legally. It clearly states whats all rights are reserved by the content creator and ho the end user can use the work. The gist of this license is the “commons” ideology. It is considered to be roviding an alternative to the “all reights reserved” copyright license to “some right reserved” creative commons license. As an aency it has aso contributed in establishing an alternative to the copy right and giving a face to the “commons” in the present age.
The understandable version of the CC Attribution 4.0 License is as follows
The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms.
Under the following terms:
Dissemination of My Work
I have already explained about my project, what is it and whats is it for in the last week page. The use of my device is for 3D scanning and making 360 degree visuals of objects. I give more preference for 360 degree photography which can be used in e-comerce websites. Today most of the e-comerce websites give only few snaps of the product from various angles. here are some leading e-comerce websites in our country. When you go through it you will notice none is giving a 360 degree visuals of any product. This is the situation where my device gets significance. Using my device we can make 360 degree visuals of products and the visuals can be embedded in the websites.One of my fiends (who is a business person) has already asked about me about making such a device so that he can go forward with the software part and marketing. The income can be from also selling the product and also from the service. Once you go through my project you will know that after taking the snaps of the product, we have to process it and merge it. If we want to embed it in a website it should be hosted in a server and we should use the "i frame" for embedding in the website. So service include , processing the images and hosting it in a server so that the client can embed it in their website using <iframe>. So the income can come from the service also.