Used Intellectual property

Intellectual Propety that our Project uses

In terms of using other people's intellectual property within our group's project, there are a number of areas that need consideration. These include the use of proprietary software and hardware, as well as designs for existing products.



The use of CryEngine 3 for our demonstrations in class fall under the terms and conditions of the End User License Agreement for the free SDK available on the Crytek website. This allows us to use the product for non-commercial use, which means we are not further distributing the product or making any money off it's specific use. Were our project to become an actual business and we were to eventually make money off of selling this our design, we would still fall under the use of the free SDK, because the use of the game engine is for demonstration purposes and proof of concept for our product, it would not be part of the actual final design. If we were to still use it during an actual business stage of the project, it would be purely for demonstrations to potential clients.



The Microsoft Kinect For Windows is essentially the piece of hardware that runs the entire system, and therefore looking into the licensing agreements for it is very important for the success of the system. The licensing for the Kinect falls under two categories, the Kinect SDK (software development Kit) and the actual Microsoft Kinect for Windows.



For the Kinect SDK, we would be able to use the free SDK with our product as long as we were very specific about how we went about it. Section three of the EULA states that you cannot rent, leases of lend the software, nor transfer it to a third party, but we would be able to bundle a disk with relevant links to things like this free SDK that a user would have to download and install themselves before our product became usable.



The actual Kinect system is a bit different from the SDK. There is no EULA available online, but for us to be able to bundle our system with a Kinect sensor, we would have to approach Microsoft and ask for a partnership or a special license that allowed us to do so. Failing Microsoft from allowing us to do this, our options would be to sell the product without the Kinect, but make it very clear that it wouldn't work without it. Otherwise we would have to look at using a different kind of sensor. Asus are making a Kinect clone, so we would be able to contact them with the same offer as we put to Microsoft.



The rest of the IP that our group would be using is relatively easy to use. Arduino is open source, and while it does have some small limitations on what you can use it on, they are very circumstantial and we wouldn't be using them in any way that would put these limitations on us. Stephen's code for the Crysis flowgraph is something that we have permission to use, but if our project were to become commercial we wouldn't be using Crysis and therefore wouldn't need it.

Coroma being the sponsors of the project would have no problems with us using images and models of their property, but none the less they would be contacted to make sure there were no license problems.

References:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/kinectforwindows/develop/sdk-eula.aspx

http://mycryengine.com/index.php?conid=43