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.

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Jerry, AI0K

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