puzzled_by_ny

It's about the contract, not what you choose to call the thing. Sorry if I offended you. We could call it "Mickey Mouse Playhouse" and it would still not matter. The contract is the only important language here. If you'd like to read and comment on that (links I provided in my post) I am would be very interested in your opinion. I don't care about what the program is called...because in court the contract is what will protect you or hurt you.

And, yes, the semantics part is deriving a meaning that does not exist or is irrelevant from my use of the term "incubator" (which, as I explained, the contract authors used with me during email conversations).

It's about the contract.

Amazing that I never thought of that. Thanks.

Once you grant them a license to your IP it might as well be free. This in the sense that they can transfer the license to someone else, manufacture your device, use it and you won't see a dime for it. From your perspective, the IP owner, they got your product for free. The investment in time, money, R&D and risk you put into the product produces no returns for you.

You conveniently skipped over the part where they require you to grant an irrevocable and transferable license to your IP for up to two years with the express ability of reproducing and using this IP.

That is not a trivial matter at all. For example, they could take your IP and transfer the license to company B. They could then ask company B to make 1,000 of your widgets for "testing"...which really means using. They could do so for about two years. At the end of two years you have derived zero benefit from a thousand of your widgets being manufactured and used to solve a problem, the market changes, someone circumvents what you created (maybe company B) and you find yourself filing for bankruptcy protection.

This isn't a small matter at all. If we remove this requirement your comment might be applicable. Otherwise, you are posting a comment about something this thing is not.

Yet another take. If this is, as you state, just a call for proposals, why in the world are they asking for an irrevocable and transferable license to participants IP that could last up to two years?

Put a different way: If this is just a sales call, why would they require such a thing?

> And why are you calling it an incubator?

It's terminology they used during conversations. On the site they also call it "accelerator".

Don't focus on semantics. As is the case for patents, where the blah-blah doesn't matter, only the claims matter, the only thing that matters here is the contract you sign. We could call this thing "A trip to Disneyland" and still the contract terms would rule the relationship.

You really need to read the two contracts. One of them being an addendum related to COVID-19. That's why I provided links to everything. The only reason I had to summarize my findings is that HN limits posts to 2,000 characters...so it's hard to explore corner cases in an initial post.

For example, if we take the text you posted, we are looking at a 12 month unpaid pilot, during which you agree to grant an irrevocable (etc...) license to your IP that explicitly allows them to build, replicate and use your product without paying you a dime. Furthermore, you grant an extension of this license for 9 to 12 months (depending on how you read it) past the pilot period. And, to make it even more fun, you grant them the right to transfer this license to anyone else.

In our case the product is hardware with software and an ML/AI component. It represents a non-trivial amount of investment in both time and money --self funded. In order to participate in this program we have to be willing to watch a random entity reproduce our system and USE IT for basically two years, potentially without compensation. What do you want to bet that the market for these specific COVID-19 devices is very different 18 to 24 months from now?

And then there's the potential for them to grant our IP license to <insert large well-embedded company here> and effectively cut us completely out of the loop.

The more I read and extrapolate these terms the more they seem to stink.