19. Invention, intellectual property and income¶

This week Professor Niel gave a tour throught the various facets of Intellectual Property rights. Also brief introductions were given on how to protect and copyright the invention.

Intellectual Property rights¶

Intellectual property is the intangible product of human intellect. Over the years of civilization mankind has accumulated knowledge about various things which he could interact with the nature. In old times, laws never existed to protect invention. Though ideally Intellectual property rights shall never exist, as some with invention would had always relied on the accumulated knowledge which he had from his predecessors,in this commercialized world invention means business and business mostly means income generation. Intellectual rights include patents,copyright,industrial design rights, trademarks, plant breeder’s right etc.

Patents¶

Patents are the rights granted to the inventor over a short period of time to protect the invention, allowing him to commercialise the invention. It prevents others from using it with out the knowledge of the inventor. Patent laws exists for various countries, therby which patents can be applied and received.

Copyright¶

It is a form of Intellectual Property that gives the creator of an original work the legal right to enforce the terms and conditions upon which his creation can be used. Some of the various types of opensource popular Public Copyright licenses are

Creative Commons
GNU General Public licenses (GNU GPL)
GNU Lesser General Public License(GNU LPL)
Apache License, Version 2.0
The 3-Clause BSD License
BSD 2-Clause “Simplified” or “FreeBSD” license
MIT license
Mozilla Public License 2.0
Common Development and Distribution License
Eclipse Public License

TradeMark¶

TradeMark is the process of labelling products/services with recognizable texts/insignia for identifying the creator. It shows that the product is solely owned by the company/creator. Reproduction of the product without the consent of the owner will account for infringement of copyrights. The symbols ™ (the trademark symbol) and ® (the registered trademark symbol) can be used to indicate trademarks; the latter is only for use by the owner of a trademark that has been registered.

Here for protecting the intellectual property rights only Copyrights will account for. Truly these licenses are so lengthy that I decide to read only Creative Commons,GNU GPL and MIT License.

Creative Commons¶

Creative Commons licenses are applied by the copyright owner to their own works. These are the most prominently used licenses of their type in the world. There are four components to the licenses that are arranged in six configurations:

BY - Attribution required.
NC - No commercial use.
ND - No derivative works.
SA - Share Alike - the license must be the same on any derivative works.

The ND and SA components cannot be combined, as SA only applies to derivative works.

The six licenses (excluding CC-0 which is an equivalent to the Public Domain) are:

CC-BY
CC-BY-SA
CC-BY-ND
CC-BY-NC
CC-BY-NC-ND
Creative Commons Source:https://pitt.libguides.com/copyright/licenses

Copyleft licenses¶

Copyleft licenses offers users the freedom of using the work and distributing the work under the condition that derivates may be licensed with the same rights. Creative Commons
Symbol copyleft

GNU General Public License is the first and most popular copyleft license adopted. It gives users four freedoms namely

Copyleft licenses give each person who possesses the work the same rights as the original author, including:

Freedom 0 – the freedom to use the work,
Freedom 1 – the freedom to study the work,
Freedom 2 – the freedom to copy and share the work with others,
Freedom 3 – the freedom to modify the work, and the freedom to distribute modified and therefore derivative works.

GNU General Public License ¶

The GNU General Public License is a free, copyleft license for software and other kinds of works. Preamble of GNU GPL states

“The GNU General Public License is a free, copyleft license for software and other kinds of works.

The licenses for most software and other practical works are designed to take away your freedom to share and change the works. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change all versions of a program–to make sure it remains free software for all its users. We, the Free Software Foundation, use the GNU General Public License for most of our software; it applies also to any other work released this way by its authors. You can apply it to your programs, too.

When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price. Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for them if you wish), that you receive source code or can get it if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs, and that you know you can do these things.

To protect your rights, we need to prevent others from denying you these rights or asking you to surrender the rights. Therefore, you have certain responsibilities if you distribute copies of the software, or if you modify it: responsibilities to respect the freedom of others.

For example, if you distribute copies of such a program, whether gratis or for a fee, you must pass on to the recipients the same freedoms that you received. You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the source code. And you must show them these terms so they know their rights.

Developers that use the GNU GPL protect your rights with two steps: (1) assert copyright on the software, and (2) offer you this License giving you legal permission to copy, distribute and/or modify it.

For the developers’ and authors’ protection, the GPL clearly explains that there is no warranty for this free software. For both users’ and authors’ sake, the GPL requires that modified versions be marked as changed, so that their problems will not be attributed erroneously to authors of previous versions.

Some devices are designed to deny users access to install or run modified versions of the software inside them, although the manufacturer can do so. This is fundamentally incompatible with the aim of protecting users’ freedom to change the software. The systematic pattern of such abuse occurs in the area of products for individuals to use, which is precisely where it is most unacceptable. Therefore, we have designed this version of the GPL to prohibit the practice for those products. If such problems arise substantially in other domains, we stand ready to extend this provision to those domains in future versions of the GPL, as needed to protect the freedom of users.

Finally, every program is threatened constantly by software patents. States should not allow patents to restrict development and use of software on general-purpose computers, but in those that do, we wish to avoid the special danger that patents applied to a free program could make it effectively proprietary. To prevent this, the GPL assures that patents cannot be used to render the program non-free.”

Source: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html

Plan for dissemination of Final Project¶

FabAcademy allowed me to have access to a large volume of refined and acccumulated knowledge. These are from the sweat and blood of so many who had worked tirelessly so that people like me can have access to it. I strongly believe that I owe them the same rights which they had given me thereby protecting the rights of the creators of this knowledge. As a human with strong scientific temper I wish to license all my work here in the FAbAcademy based on GNU General Public Licence V3.0.

Income and Business¶

Truly I had never thought about commercialising the product. I guess if I am to increase the commercial value of the product, I will have to make a prototype that can perform with high accuracy and resolution. The present prototype is with low resolution for calculating angles and distance. Also I find that the application is more useful in the indoor applciations. With the present configuration I could find possible users in the construction, architecture and interior design industry.

Like Niel said if I am to sell this , I should be able to sell its benefits first. I just pondered about the possible advantages over conventional T station that it can be made really cheap.

To popularise the mini -T station, I can organise free workshops on basic surveying in Polytechnics and Engineering Schools in India and encourage them to use it .I intend to target rural parts of the country where the Construction industry is all ill organised and evolving.

I see another possibility in using at places where displacement and rotation are to be monitored. For them I could manufacture customised product services.