Fabacademy 2017
Eighteenth Week. Invention, Intellectual Property, and Income
Index
Eighteenth task
Develop a plan for dissemination of your final project
As I explained on the about page Fabwindow is part of my recent PhD thesis on digital fabrication and self-build. For license research I will focus Creative commons and the fab license. I found this interesting resource made by github that help choose the right license for your software projects.
Comparing two licenses
License 1: Creative Commons
Creative Commons is not a single license but a 'suite' of licenses that allows authors to fine tune what it is allowed and prohibited to do with their intellectual work. By combining three variables –author recognition, allowing or not commercial use and allowing or not the remix and adaptation of the original work– creative commons offers 6 different types of license. They range from most open –only required to recognize authorship– to most closed –recognize authorship, not allowing remixes and not allowing commercial work–. Creative Commons is well supported around the world with a global foundation and local communities in most countries, media platforms like Flickr, Youtube and Vimeo offer native support to Creative Commons so it is quite simple to license your work using them.
License 2: Fab Lincese
This is the full text of the license:
(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.
This license was originally created to distribute work produced by MIT into the fab lab network. There are three parts of the license. First the permissions that the license owner allows "This work may be reproduced, modified, distributed, performed, and displayed for any purpose", second it lists the conditions for these permissions to apply "but must acknowledge "project name"." and "Copyright is retained and must be preserved". Finally, the limitations of this license are described "The work is provided as is; no warranty is provided, and users accept all liability"
With this license you give a lot of permissions to anybody willing to use your work but at the same time the author retains the copyright they need to respect the authorship and lineage of the work and gives the author the ability to license the work to companies interested in using this work commercially.
As it is part of my Phd research I have decided to use a restrictive Creative Commons License for the graphic material and text, and copyrigth the design files until I have a clearer idea of what will be be the final ouptput for all this work.
License
All text and photos are licensed by Javi BuronGarcia under a CC BY-NC-ND license. All design files are copyrighted by Javi BuronGarcía ©2107.
Dissemination plan
The first step will be to write and document about a couple of aspects of the project. First, the idea of building complex profiles by dividing into sections with single side operations as I think this could be interesting for other fabrication projects. Second, the idea of object-oriented architecture, an architectural design approach differing from the idea of the building as the standard scale unit for architectural practice.
I am also interested in exploring the idea of how this design could be commercialized. A window is an object that requires a high level of customization as openings almost inevitably vary dimensionally from building to building.
A possibility would be set up a web interface so users could generate the cutting files for their customized windows which could be brough to their local fab lab to be fabricated locally. Fab market and Open Desk have similar business models. A layer of interface would be needed to make possible the dimensional customization of the window directly by the user.
It would be great to have advice and suggestions from the fab lab network to see how this could happen.
Presentation.png and Presentation.mp4
