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.