Thread: Write Off
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Old November 10th 14, 08:08 PM posted to rec.radio.amateur.antenna
Lostgallifreyan Lostgallifreyan is offline
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First recorded activity by RadioBanter: Sep 2006
Posts: 613
Default Write Off
(David Platt) wrote in newshg7jb-
:

As I noted earlier, if you release to the public domain, you cannot
prevent other people from using the idea.

However... if you *publish* your invention, you can often prevent
other people from coming at you years later and accusing you of
infringing *their* patents. Many high-tech companies used to do this
sort of thing... IBM, for example, would often publish new inventions
in the IBM Journal. They'd do this for ideas that they thought were
useful, that they might want to use themselves, which they didn't
think were necessarily worth the time and money to patent.

By doing so, they established the "date of invention" and "date of
first public disclosure" of a new idea. This would prevent other
people from filing patent applications on this specific invention, and
would establish this invention as "prior art".


Exactly so, and this is one thing I asked yesterday and got no answer for...
what kind of publication is considered 'adequate'? It would have to have some
reasonable guarantee of endurance, or widespread distribution at the time
even if most copies later vanished, no?

(I'm answering this post, it's the first I saw, so please forgive any lack of
response to the other. I will respond, it's just big, and possibly answers
here may make some answers reducndant there.)

(Another side issue, in case Rickman has a way to see this, after killfiling
the thread due to some habitual disruptions spilling from other threads...
I'm ok discussing this with you, I just want to keep it in one thread because
it's already way off-topic, maybe ok here, but risking thread spill to
counter thread spill is not the way I want to go)
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