17. Invention, Intellectual Property, and Business Models¶
Objectives¶
- Develop a plan for dissemination of your final project.
- Prepare drafts of your summary slide (presentation.png, 1920x1080) and video clip (presentation.mp4, 1080p HTML5, < ~minute, < ~10 MB) and put them in your root directory.
Intellectual Property¶
When creating something new, it is always difficult to prove it is your own creation, and sometimes, protecting it can be difficult. On the other hand, a lot of work on the internet is free to be shared but most of the time, the work and the creator must be acknowledged.
So the first question as a creator is: do you want to (freely?) share your work, and how?
If you keep it completely confidential, well, just make sure you don’t publish anything on publicly available websites. If you want to share or sell your work while keeping the rights to it, then it may be interesting to add some “protections”.
There are many types of intellectual property and depending on the work you want to protect and the country you want to protect them in, some are more recognized than others.
Copyright¶
This applies to “writable data”, meaning it does not cover ideas and information, only the form or the manner in which they are expressed! Copyrights are usually free.
Industrial design rights¶
They apply to the visual design of objects (shape, composition, color) that makes the product look appealing.
Patents¶
Granted by governments, they exclude other people than the creator to make, use or sell an invention for a limited period of time, but with the obligation to make it public afterward. There are design patents and utility patents.
Others¶
Trade dress, trade secrets, … There are many other ways to protect your work.
The only problem with these protections is that, first, you usually have to pay for it, and if someone steals your work, you will need even more money to defend your rights. Patents are therefore not always interesting.
Dissemination plan¶
For my work, I intend to use it for my own research so I will not publish actual results on this website. On the other hand, I don’t care about disclosing how I did the pressure control of the box, nor the phantom itself. Il will therefore freely share my work under a free license: the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA-4.0 (should not be used for software, only hardware designs) or rather the full name: ‘Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)”. This will allow others to share, copy, adapt, and redistribute it but they must give the appropriate credit and indicate any changes. Finally, they must re-use the same license and it cannot be used for commercial purposes.
I used this nice website to find the most appropriate license!
To apply it, I need to add a LICENSE.txt file in the root directory of my work.
Presentation slide¶
I started making a presentation slide. I used Photoshop to remove the background picture of my devices and used PowerPoint and Inkscape to add text.
