Legal Notices

What is OML

A method of selling a license and instructions to manufacture limited quantities of intellectual property. This is the first draft of the model that attempts to create a system which:

Lower the Barrier to Participation

Lower barriers for new inventors
Enable collaboration without exploitation
Encourage open innovation
Give consumers a voice before a product is made

Reward Creation Across Time

Create ongoing benefit for creators and makers
Reward everyone involved across a product’s entire life
Enable planned longevity of products

Let Ideas Compete on Merit, Not Scale

Turn creativity into the engine of manufacturing
Let great ideas rise through community demand, not gatekeepers
Bake innovation directly into the model

Honor Origins While Enabling Evolution

Build a system where ideas evolve while honoring their origins
Make product origins fully transparent

Make Manufacturing More Human and Sustainable

Make local, small, and medium manufacturing viable
Reduce waste and overproduction
Encourage repairability

Elevator Pitch

This is taken from the initial outreach emails sent to people who have influenced me, and I'm seeking their thoughts from.

The idea is to rethink and reshape how intellectual property is sold and turned into products, taking pieces of systems that already exist (mostly) and putting together the best parts in a way that benefits everyone involved. From the person who had the lightbulb moment but doesn’t know how to fully execute it (me, in this case), to the team members who help bring it to life, to the manufacturer who makes it, and to the consumer who buys the product. The goal is not to disrupt existing systems, but to augment them in a way that is obnoxiously positive for everyone.

The parts to put together are:

Credits like film
Royalties like music (including long-tail royalties when something remains valuable over time)
Provenance like art
Traceability like supply chains
Ownership like patents
Licensing like manufacturing
Collaboration like open-source
Demand validation like crowdfunding

To do this, we start by separating manufacturing from intellectual property in a meaningful way. I’ll use ■■■■■■ ■■■■■■ ¹ and her ■■■■■■■■ ■■■■ ¹ as an example. She could gather all of the manufacturing methods she explored into a Manufacturing Guide (MG) with the ins, outs, problems, solutions, and tradeoffs documented. The MG would contain all the information needed to make the item for every method she worked through. In other cases, it may just be a concept with a rough outline of how to do it (like this project).

The MG is packaged with a Manufacturing License (ML) and sold as information, rather than the physical product, directly to consumers. Anyone who purchases the License would be agreeing to the terms it contains, including royalties, attribution, derivative rules, and manufacturing quantity limits (ideally one, to promote small-scale and local manufacturing). This gives the end user the right to either produce the item themselves or hire someone else to produce it as a service. If a product remains valuable years later, ongoing royalties function more like a recurring “thank you” to the people who originated it.

She would then sell the IP using an NFT as a packaging and record-keeping tool. NFTs already provide world-scale, append-only provenance with minimal gatekeepers. By purchasing or owning the NFT, the end user agrees to the ML, and the NFT grants gated access to the MG. The NFT is not the product—it’s the agreement, the receipt, and the access key.

I’m calling the idea Open Manufacturing Licensing (OML) vA1.0C. My hope is that it helps people regain some level of ownership in their lives, encourages better products with longer lifespans, and creates fairer incentives across the entire lifecycle of a product. I know it’s lofty and forward-thinking, but it’s a vision—and one that feels newly possible because the technology, information access, and tooling have finally matured enough to support it.

I’ve packaged my thinking into my own OML Project Manufacturing Guide and hired a developer and a lawyer to create proof-of-concept versions of the NFT and Manufacturing License. My lofty ask would be for you to review it and help make it better. My lesser ask would be for you to stress-test the idea mentally—if, after serious consideration, you think it’s fundamentally flawed, that feedback alone would be incredibly valuable. This is very intentionally a bench test, not a pitch.

Here is a link to the Manufacturing License for OML vA1.0C (https or arweave: ar://NVNi0O7ExEosV4EkJUeKV_I16gvtKv7E7rZtxRvojGY). If you agree to the terms (simply by responding and saying so), I’m happy to send you the NFT so you can read all ~100 pages of my thinking on OML (with some help from AI). Having the NFT in your wallet will grant you access (via a LIT portal) to download the PDF. Just send me your Ethereum wallet address and I’ll get it to you. Or, if you have questions, I’m very happy to discuss them.

Regardless of what comes out of this, thank you for reading this far. I’m excited by the potential of the idea, and honestly a little terrified by it at the same time.

Regards,

Silas Trunk (my pseudonym as I have zero desire to be publicly known)

P.S. This email is part of my initial outreach to people who have influenced my thinking. In the interest of transparency, I’ve published this outreach email on the Idea Trunk website. This first round of outreach was to 32 people who I believe would understand the idea and could provide thinking on it.

Open Manufacturing Licensing Version A 1.0 Concept (OML vA1.0C)