Grace Kang
Elevate your design and manufacturing processes with Autodesk Fusion
Here’s what you missed from our latest episode of the Shop Talk podcast.
Shop Talk is a podcast by Autodesk Fusion in which we hang out with designers and makers live from their workshops. We’re excited to give our listeners candid conversations with talented folks who pour their hearts and souls into their craft. In this episode, we sit down with Mike Clifford, aka Modustrial Maker, to talk about how he went from a patent attorney to a full-time maker.
Mike Clifford is a content creator and maker here on YouTube. He began his career as an attorney before falling in love with making things. After learning every bit of industrial design knowledge he could find, Mike took a leap of faith and quit his law firm to focus on creating full-time. And we’re glad he did! His YouTube channel is filled with creative projects ranging from home and furniture renovations to builds for franchises like Star Wars. Keep reading to get a snippet from the episode.
Do you find yourself wanting to patent your creations? My dad is a lawyer, and anytime I had a prototype, my dad would hound me to apply for a patent. But this was the early days of open source and sharing stuff online. I feel as if there was a generational divide in that regard. I saw more value in sharing my ideas and getting feedback, than creating intellectual property.
Like a lot of things, the truth is somewhere in the middle. When I started working with Google, they had almost no patents. Then the tune changed when they realized some of their competitors had tens of thousands of patents. They needed to do something about it, but on a smaller scale.
I actually don’t own any patents. I kind of got so sick of writing them at work that it got hard for me to do in my spare time. But I do think there’s merit to putting your idea out there. But you can actually put your idea out there for some time, then still get a patent afterward. You can show it to people
I usually approach it more like a business decision- what are your odds that the patent is going to be worth more money than the cost of patenting it? Because are you going to be able to protect that patent? Will you be able to do something with it? Are you trying to sell your product to a bigger company that might want to patent it for themselves? Just because you own a patent doesn’t mean you have to enforce it- you can choose what you do with it.
Some companies get a patent and then give away a free license. I know Autodesk has an educational license, where you’re giving a copyright license to students for free. Patents and intellectual property aren’t inherently good or evil. It’s up to the owner to do something good or evil with it. What I usually tell people is, “Look, don’t think you’re a bad person because you get a patent. If it makes financial sense, get one.” You never know when you’ll want one later on, and you can choose not to do anything with it.
Stay tuned for the next episode of Shop Talk. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel, catch up on any episodes you missed, and get your audio-only fix on Spotify.