In article ,
Lostgallifreyan wrote:

The main thing I need to know now is: can nothing but a full patent protect
my own work from being effectively satolen from the instant I put it in the
public domain, leaving me with absolutely no right to distribute or profit
from it in any way at all?

I think you're throwing a whole bunch of different terms and thoughts
into a stewpot here, and the flavors aren't mixing well.

Point #1: the term "public domain" has a broadly-accepted legal
meaning. It means "This idea belongs to the public as a whole. No
one has proprietary rights to it. Anyone can use it without asking
permission or paying anybody for the rights."

So, if you do in fact "put it in the public domain", you would be
doing so in a way which *explicitly* renounces any proprietary rights
to the invention, and deliberately gives up control over how it was
used.

It seems to be a good question as to whether an inventor can in fact
release something completely to the public domain... in some
jurisdictions there's a clear way to do this, I understand, while in
others there is not. Some poeple who do wish to do this, do it
explicitly by publishing a statement on the order of "I grant
everyone, everywhere, a perpetual free transferrable license to use
this invention for any purpose whatsoever."

This is clearly not what you want to do.

Now, even if you *did* release something to the public domain, that
doesn't prevent you from distributing it in other ways or making a
profit. You can still do that.

All it does, is prevent you from *stopping* other people from doing
so.

The latter is the *specific* purpose of the patent system. A patent
grants you a specific time-limited right to prevent other people from
using your invention, in return for your having adequately described
the invention in a clear way so that other people can learn from it.

If that IS so, then the patent system is violently in need of serious reform,

Ummm... that's what a patent *is*.

A patent is, in effect, a government's agreement, to put the
government's power behind your right-of-exclusivity, for a limited
period of time, in return for you being willing to describe your
invention (to help advance the state of the art).

but as far as I'm concerned it basically means one thing: I shall never
release my work. If the workd will not share it, it will die with me. End of
discussion.

That is entirely your right.

What you would have, then, is a "trade secret". It something that
know how to do, that you choose to keep secret. You can profit by the
sale of its results. You can maintain exclusivity, by not sharing the
secret (which doesn't mean that you can't tell specific people, but
you would have to have and enforce a proper non-disclosure
agreement).

With a trade secret, you have no protection against somebody
rediscovering the same idea independently, and then using it or
selling it or giving it away for free. Unless you can prove that they
actually took *your* idea (e.g. somebody who was under non-disclosure
with you broke their agreement and leaked the secret), you have no
rights in this case.

Basically, you have two choices - keep the secret to yourself (and
carry the whole burden of keeping it secret, and the whole risk that
somebody will invent the same thing independently), or agree to
disclose the secret under controlled conditions and (in return) gain
some degree of government-sanctioned protection against unauthorized
use.

Frankly, patents don't seem to be a good protection for the small
innovator. Not only are they expensive and troublesome to get, but
the cost of enforcing them still falls on your shoulders... big
companies may (and often do) ignore them, use the idea, and figure
that the cost of prosecuting a patent infringement is beyond the means
of a small inventor.