Week 17: Invention, Intellectual Property, and Business Models
Create and document a license for your final project. Develop a plan for dissemination of your Final Project . Prepare a summary slide (presentation.png, 1280x1024) and video clip (presentation.mp4, 1080p HTML5, < ~minute, < ~10 MB) in your root directory
Learning outcomes:
- Recognize the range of licenses available
- Formulate Future Opportunities
Have you:
- Summarised two kinds of licences and explained why you chose one.
- Imagined and outlined possibilities and described how to make them probabilities
My Process
Background
I am generally interested in liberatory and collaborative regimes for managing intellectual property (IP). I spent the summer of 2014 as part of Open Source Ecology's (OSE) Summer of Extreme Design/Build working on Open Source farm and making equipment (compressed earth brickpress, tractors, 3d printers, laser cutter). OSE is developing a set of 50 open-source machines that will allow a small-scale civilization to sustain itself. You can check out the founder's TED talk if you are interested:
OSE primarily uses the Creative Commons - Attribution, Share-alike license (also know as CC-BY-SA). This is a fairly liberal license; it allows others to copy, redistribute, reproduce protected works, even for private, commercial use, as long as they 1) cite the original author and 2) share any derivative work and/or improvements they create based upon the original. OSE specifically wants people to be able to use their designs in commercial settings - small business production is one way they hope to disseminate their designs and create a community of users and contributors. The "share-alike" portion of the license is then crucial to help ensure a feed-forward mechanism so that any improvements are likewise shared and protected as a part of the commons.
I tend to like this philosophy, and so have licensed my Fab Academy website and contributions under this same CC-BY-SA license. At the bottom of each page, you can see the CC-BY-SA logo and a link to the license details.
As I think about my Final Project, I think I may want to protect it under a slightly more restricted license. Because it is a product intended for use with a child - even an infant, I would like just a little bit more protection. If I were, for instance, planning to commercialize and sell this baby carrier rocker, I would want to have it rigorously tested by a group such as the Underwriters' Laboratory or the CE marking group and possibly also by a child-specific testing group. Because I plan to just use the product for personal use "at my own risk", I don't intend to seek any of these certifications. But because of this, I would also like to be sure that others also only use it for personal use "at their own risk". So I will probably use a Creative Commons Attribution, Share-Alike, Non-Commercial () license.
I will probably also include a message something to the effect that: "The work is provided as is; no warranty is provided, and users accept all liability." This line was taken from Neil's license in Fab Modules/Mods. All of this is to say that if someone did want to approach me about commercializing the idea, I wouldn't be opposed to a conversation about it. I just don't want anyone taking it commercial without a conversation first. And I want anyone who uses/makes it to understand that they are using it at their own risk.
I appreciated Neil's commentary about patents, and how they are basically not that useful in the context of Fab Labs. I was especially interested in the aspect of needing to defend a patent in order for it to remain valid. The issue of patent trolls and fraudulent patent abuse is an important one, and is difficult to address under the current IP regime. I think a world where more collaborative and sharing-based intellectual property were the norm would side-step the issue of patent-trolls nicely.
Prior Art
A quick google search does turn up some results for Carseat/Baby Carrier Rockers. The closest commercial items I found were on Amazon:
The "Rock On" model is more similar to mine in that it has a base that the seat sits on, but it's mechanistically very different; it actually has a rocking portion of the base, rocking the whole station (rather than using the curved rockers already on the car seat). The "Dozer" is mechanistically more similar, using the carseat's built-in rocking ability. The "Dozer gets terrible reviews (54% are 1-star) and is "Currently Unavailable". The Rock On gets better reviews and currently retails for $42 US. These products do show there's at least some market for this idea, as well as others who have previously commercialized the concept. If I did want to commercialize my rocker, I would aim to perform better than these products and come in under $50 (ideally) or $100 (definitely).
Another thing I found were a bunch of "hacked" baby rockers. Dads had jury rigged various motors or appilances to rock baby bouncy seats or cribs/basinettes. These are mechanistically and logistically pretty different from my idea, but conceptually related:
As I say, these are conceptually similar, but I hope to improve substantially on the "plug and play" nature of my project. (I.e. I want to be able to simply place the carseat carrier into my base unit, press "Go" and it will rock, without all the linkages and contraptions shown here.) I also hope to integrate my systems much more nicely and cleanly, so that it doesn't look "hacked", jury-rigged, and cobbled-together like these examples do. (Not that there's anything wrong with hacked projects - I just don't think these would fit the bill for a Fab Academy final project!)
Future Opportunities
As I've mentioned, I don't want to commercialize or monetize this idea. The potential pitfalls are too great (liability for making a children's/infant product) and I don't think there's that much potential for revenue (though I could be wrong here - it's a pretty big market, especially if I can make a design that works with most infant carrier seats). In order to share and disseminate the project though, I think there are two forums that would be good: Instructables and Hack-A-Day.
Instructables is a fantastic website I've been perusing for years (a friend first introduced me to it in 2005). Users submit instructions for how to make or create things. Often great care and detail go into the instructions, with photos, explanations, educational contents, etc. I have been inspired by many projects that I've seen in the past, and it would be fun to put together a really comprehensive Instructable for this project in order to contribute to that community. I also think it's the kind of project that could generate some interest on the platform. If there were a lot of interest (e.g many people were asking to buy one), it would be a good indication that the project might be a good candidate for a Kickstarter or other crowdfunding platform (to get some capital in place to do more rigorous design, testing, and safety certifications). In any case, it's a great way to get the idea and source files out to a broader audience.
Hack-a-Day is another great website I've been perusing for years. They are less focused on instructional content than Instructables, but they have a great platform for daily showcases of fun DIY projects and hacks. If I made a really good Instructable, I could also submit it to Hack-A-Day, with a link back to the Instructable (and of course, to my Fab Academy website!). I have seen other "parenting hacks" on the site, and it could potentially be a hit there too. Again, it would be fun to contribute a project to a community I've been inspired by for a long time, and could also be a good way to generate and gauge interest in my carseat rocker project.
Presentation Slide
I don't really have much content developed yet to put in my final project slide, but I did create a placeholder:
Here's a link to the GIMP source file (.XCF file). This sourcefile will be updated as I add content to the slide.