In article ,
Lostgallifreyan wrote:

I won't patent. I've been reading of the cost in the UK. (All figures are
UKP) 3000 to 6000. Add 10000 give or take not very much to add US protection.
That;s in the first year. You have to add about 4 grand more within a year
and a half, maybe more, and that's ignoring ALL costs of actually defending a
patent! Add those, the costs soar to around 150 grand.

I will not release my code to the public domain unless there is a GUARANTEED
way to prevent patent trolls and sharks from stealing it, a way that does not
extort more money than I may ever earn before I even start to earn it!

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".

If there is no such way, then I may release code that strictly emulates an
existing instrument (the Yamaha DX7) in its main funtion, and on the strength
of that, I will hope to find a performer who can afford to take on the
extended code privately as a performing instrument.

Why is it that patents force me to seriously consider ideas of elite
sponsorship that belong to the 16th century?! Has the world of ideas and the
right to profit from original work really progresses so little in all those
years? After all, the only way to win the game is to have already won. I'm
not going to cause myself misery fighting tautologies like that.

I don't think patents are what I should be asking about. The real question
is: how do I defend my work from the patent system while trying to earn money
from it, or share it with the world?

An important question is this: do you want to earn money from it, or
do you want to *prevent* other people from earning money from it?

If you want to do the latter, "patent" and "trade secret" are the only
ways I know of.

If the former, you can publish the idea (establishing a "prior art"
barrier against somebody else trying to patent the same idea), and
then go ahead and sell implementations of that idea under whatever
terms you desire.

You can always *copyright* your *specific* implementations (the actual
code, circuit schematics, and so forth). That's a whole type of
protection which is independent of patents, since it protects specific
examples rather than the underlying idea.

(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)

(David Platt) wrote in newshg7jb-
:

An important question is this: do you want to earn money from it, or
do you want to *prevent* other people from earning money from it?


Which I asnwered, emphatically. Easily lost by now, perhaps..
I don't mind other people making money from their work using mine to help do
it. I just don't want them claiming it as their own, and denying ME the right
to earn from my own work! Especially if they want to sit back in their
millions, creating nothing while preening themselves on yet another cruel
aquisition at yet another person's hard earned expense. I will not lift a
finger to help that kind of thing. Dying alone knowing what I have created is
an easier thing to bear. If no part of the world will help me, then no part
of the world will share the work.

If you want to do the latter, "patent" and "trade secret" are the only
ways I know of.

If the former, you can publish the idea (establishing a "prior art"
barrier against somebody else trying to patent the same idea), and
then go ahead and sell implementations of that idea under whatever
terms you desire.

You can always *copyright* your *specific* implementations (the actual
code, circuit schematics, and so forth). That's a whole type of
protection which is independent of patents, since it protects specific
examples rather than the underlying idea.


Absolutely, I'll be doing that anyway. I suspect that it won't be enough, but
it will at least lock down the form it had at some specific time. The problem
is that it's a form of self-publication, I imagine not as solid as a third-
party publication that has already got some public respect. I'm not sure what
'weight' of publication carries enough authority to give good protection
against furture predation.

On 11/10/2014 2:33 PM, David Platt wrote:
In article ,
Lostgallifreyan wrote:

I won't patent. I've been reading of the cost in the UK. (All figures are
UKP) 3000 to 6000. Add 10000 give or take not very much to add US protection.
That;s in the first year. You have to add about 4 grand more within a year
and a half, maybe more, and that's ignoring ALL costs of actually defending a
patent! Add those, the costs soar to around 150 grand.

I will not release my code to the public domain unless there is a GUARANTEED
way to prevent patent trolls and sharks from stealing it, a way that does not
extort more money than I may ever earn before I even start to earn it!

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".


Unfortunately, this is no longer true. The U.S. law changed last year
such that prior art isn't so important. Nowadays, it's "first to file".

See http://www.uspto.gov/aia_implementat...t_inventor.jsp.

--
==================
Remove the "x" from my email address
Jerry, AI0K

==================

(David Platt) wrote in news:u2g7jb-
:

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."


Good point, I forgot it IS that specific. I was confusing acccess with
ownership.

(David Platt) wrote in news:u2g7jb-
:

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.


Well, I might. So long as they do not then go on to stop me earning from
it myself! That's the prospect that really adds injury to insult. (Yes, that
IS the right way round, in this case.)

"David Platt" wrote in message
...
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.

In fact, by rabbiting on endlessly about it in an off-topic polluting thread
he has destroyed any chance that he might have had for a patent.

"Lostgallifreyan" wrote in message
. ..

Exactly so, and this is one thing I asked yesterday and got no answer
for...
what kind of publication is considered 'adequate'?

That is because thos NG is for radio amateurs discussing antennae, and
not for some electronics dabbler in an unrelated topic.

(David Platt) wrote in news:u2g7jb-
:

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.


Maybe this isn't hopeless then, because they can do that, I'd be happy if
they did, so long as they gave formal credit where it's due. That way it
helps me in later work I may create.

Basically, nature shows several patterns, birds, for example, may eat each
other, grabbing other birds right out of the air, but even then they do not
do it just for fun, and most birds look out for each other, and will 'mob' a
predator for each other's general benefit, often taking real risks to do it
too. If all I see is the diving claws, them I'm out of it, period. I'm just
looking for some practical way to resist that ****.

(David Platt) wrote in news:u2g7jb-
:

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).


Currently our goverment is a predator! Maybe patent really is not the way,
regardless of intent, on the general principle that one should not pick
fights that are extremely unlikely to be victorious.

I am not here to make lawyers and rich men smug and fatter at my expense.