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Comments: 266 +- Your Rights Online: Should I Publish Or Patent? on Thursday October 15, @08:29AM
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BorgeStrand writes 'Patenting is an expensive process, even coming up with some sort of proof that your idea is unique (and thereby try to attract financing) may be prohibitive for the lone inventor. So what do you folks out there do when you come up with a good idea but don't have the means to patent it or market it to someone who will pay for the patenting process? And how much sense does it really make for the lone inventor to patent something? Would it make more sense to publish the whole idea, and make it (and my inventive brainpower) up for grabs? If my ideas are indeed valuable, what is the best way to gain anything from them without investing too much financially? What is your experience?'
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come on (Score:5, Funny)
Re:come on (Score:5, Funny)
I'm still trying to figure out that last part,
I believe the standard notation for this is a single line containing three question marks.
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Re: (Score:2)
This is slashdot, all patents are evil, and the most profitable thing for you to do would be to to let everyone know the details, and let them all build whatever it is you invented. That way, it gets worked on by different people in an open source way and you get a better ultimate product. And somehow you profit from that. I'm still trying to figure out that last part, but if a million slashdotters say something it can't be wrong.
I believe the standard notation for this is a single line containing three question marks.
Brilliant. Thank you. You've just made my morning.
publish or perish (Score:3, Insightful)
In some industries its publish or perish.
For one case there was a device invented by a woman I know to aid in moving patients about in a hospital bed. It improves patient safety and staff safety. She was told that because she patented it, the companies would wait out her patent even though she was not seeking significant money for the idea. Profit for her would have been having a safer job.
Publishing would have been better, establishing prior art is sometimes more important since it encourages competitio
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:come on (Score:4, Interesting)
Do this - publish your idea in the most obscure way possible. Don't put it on the web. Instead, make sure some library like the one Sarah Palin likes to ban books from in Wasilla, Alaska. I kid you not - this is advice I've had from multiple patent attorneys. It protects your idea, and is nearly free, without much chance of tipping off your competitors.
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Do this - publish your idea in the most obscure way possible. ... I kid you not - this is advice I've had from multiple patent attorneys. It protects your idea, and is nearly free, without much chance of tipping off your competitors.
How does this protect your idea? IANAL, but it's my understanding that a public disclosure immediately invalidates your non-US patent rights, and starts a one-year clock ticking on the filing period for a US patent. The obscurity of your disclosure may prevent others from learning of your idea, but not disclosing it at all will have the same effect; neither method will prevent others from utilizing the idea, should they learn of it.
It helps protect your idea because if it's published, you have a lesser chance of becoming the next Robert Jacobsen [wikipedia.org], who wrote an open-source java software package that a sleazy company used to build their product upon, patent, and then sue Jacobsen for infringing on their patent. So far they've won tens of thousands of dollars from him, as well as the tens of thousands he's spent defending himself, although he seems to be winning the latest round of lawsuits.
is it really that expensive ?? (Score:3, Insightful)
In early days you were required to have a patent lawyer in order to perform a thorough search of the archives. They gave you the template and you wrote in the substance. You no longer need this http://www.google.com/patents/ [google.com] has all the patents listed in a very searchable format. you can do the search your self find all references and using legal zoom file the patent yourself. You don't even have to mail it there are patent offices all over the place. In my experience (or should I say research) you have a
Re: (Score:3)
I see no hint as to what BorgeStrand wants to patent. Is it some PHYSICAL ITEM OR METHOD?? Some NEW GADGET? If not, you need to look at COPYRIGHT LAW. "Patent or publish". It sounds to me like you, like most of corporate America, haven't a clue as to what a patent is SUPPOSED to be.
BorgeStrand needs to get off our lawns, at least until he's able to come back and post a meaningful question. "Patent or publish?" Just plain stupid.
Really? (Score:2, Insightful)
Does your boss read slashdot?
Cause, boy do I have an Insightful and Interesting post to show him/her.
Re:come on (Score:4, Insightful)
Geeks on slashdot get to have it both ways - getting rich while making the world a better place. Try starting a company that offers good jobs to deserving employees, and see you you feel as they raise good kids and enjoy their work. Invent something worthwhile, and force the world to benefit from it - you'd be very surprised at how often the world passes by perfectly good ides. Only the inventor can champion new technologies properly. Be a do-gooder: start companies, develop open source projects when it makes sense, improve the world with your ideas. Being a big geek rocks.
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This is also why there's almost no interest in coming up with drugs to treat diseases which primarily effect poor people in the 3rd world.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Consider that an unpatented idea can be used by multiple corporations in competition, and that by not having to pay royalties all of those companies can sell the product for less because it costs them less to produce while still making the same profit.
Yes, a single source can charge what they want and pocket the money they'd have paid in royalties, but
Tell Me (Score:5, Funny)
Simply tell me what your patentable idea is and I'll take care of everything for you.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Also, a working prototype would be helpful.
Small entity? (Score:5, Insightful)
You also don't necessarily need an expensive attorney to file a US patent application - you can do it yourself, provided you conform to certain formal requirements. For an application which goes smoothly through the process, the small entity fees are less than $2000 http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/qs/ope/fee2009september15.htm [uspto.gov]. If there are many office actions, this total could easily double or triple, however, so preparing the application carefully is essential. I'd recommend you peruse the documents at http://www.uspto.gov/patents/basics/index.html [uspto.gov], and get a copy of 37CFR part 1 (patent rules) and the MPEP http://www.uspto.gov/patents/law/index.jsp [uspto.gov].
FWIW, I've had a couple of patents which issued without any intervening office actions, but they were the exceptions. Most involved a few office actions, and a couple involved many office actions. Every office action involves a fee, even if the action was due to the PTO losing papers which they had officially acknowledged receiving (that case is still ongoing).
Also, publishing in some journal or on the web does not necessarily prevent someone else from filing a patent application on much the same thing. The US PTO does not and cannot search ALL possible publications when looking for prior art, and if a patent is wrongly issued, it would be up to you to challenge it in court (at much higher expense than actually getting a patent)). The PTO does search all US patents and US patent applications, however. So filing a patent application, and then abandoning it at the first office action, is a good and relatively cheap way of publishing your idea in a way that prevents everyone else from getting a patent on it. They'd have to make significant changes beyond anything clearly contemplated in your application to get their application through the PTO.
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Patent if it's practical, publish if it's risky. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you patent, it'll be expensive.
If you don't patent, but end up making it, someone else will patent it and sue you, that will be more expensive.
However, if it'll never really be marketable, publish, someone might think oooo nifty, and hire you because it sounds great.
Re:Patent if it's practical, publish if it's risky (Score:5, Insightful)
If you patent, it'll be expensive. If you don't patent, but end up making it, someone else will patent it and sue you, that will be more expensive.
No to the second part-- if you publish before they file the patent, their patent filing won't help them, the patent is invalidated by prior art (=your publication).
In fact, if you keep good enough notes (signed and witnessed) to show your date of invention, and to show that you were diligent in working to bring the invention to workability (i.e., that you didn't just have the idea and abandon it), then they can't succeed in suing you, either, because you can prove you invented it first.
(However, if you had the idea, and didn't diligently work on reducing it to practive, you're out of luck. No cookies from the patent office to ideas that are abandoned and not reduced to practice.)
Disclaimer: IANAL
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No to the second part-- if you publish before they file the patent, their patent filing won't help them, the patent is invalidated by prior art (=your publication).
Like that's going to stop the USPTO clerks. Fighting a patent is even more expensive than getting one, anyway.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Nothing will stop them from filing their patent unless you are aware of their filing, and object.
Then, if you were to do something w/ your idea, they may very well sue you, regardless of their patent's invalidity, making the gamble that you'd rather settle than deal with the legal proceedings required to invalidate their patent.
These guys aren't doing it cause they're smart. They're doing it because they think there's easy money to be made, and it's a pain in the ass to defend y
Re:Patent if it's practical, publish if it's risky (Score:5, Insightful)
IANAPL but...
If you patent, it'll be expensive.
If you don't patent, but end up making it, someone else will patent it and sue you, that will be more expensive.
No to the second part-- if you publish before they file the patent, their patent filing won't help them, the patent is invalidated by prior art (=your publication).
That is the theory and, in some countries, patent examiners will look through reputable journals etc when looking for prior art but, in my experience, US examiners only look in existing US patents (and patent applications). Once a patent is granted it sounds like it is very difficult - in the US at least - to get it overturned.
The question is also where do you publish? If you can't get it into a journal, AFAIU one possible option might be just to file it as a patent and then abandon it before the really expensive charges occur. It should then, (again AFAIU), end up in the public domain.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Patent if it's practical, publish if it's risky (Score:4, Informative)
If you patent, it'll be expensive.
In the US, you can apply for a provisional patent [uspto.gov] for $110. This is a simplified, essentially abstract patent application you can use to hold your place in the patent line while you go off and find someone to commercialize/help you commercialize your idea.
You've still got a year after publication to make a provisional filing, but you also get a year after the provisional filing before the full application.
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You can do both (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I had an IP lawyer tell me that the provisional patent is completely pointless. You don't have to file a provisional patent to get this protection. You can publish, then patent up to a year later and your idea is still protected.
Re:You can do both (Score:5, Informative)
I had an IP lawyer tell me that the provisional patent is completely pointless. You don't have to file a provisional patent to get this protection. You can publish, then patent up to a year later and your idea is still protected.
...but only in the US. If you do as suggested above you will have screwed up your protection for the rest of the world (or at least the majority of it :-) ). Get your patent filed first, to get a "priority date" and you then have, something like, a year to file in other countries. In the mean time you can publish if you want.
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Patenting doesn't have to be expensive, buuuut... (Score:5, Insightful)
I believe the only unavoidable cost of getting a patent is the filing fee (and the issuing fee, if it's accepted), but that only amounts to a few hundred dollars. There are maintenance fees every few years, and while these are a bit more expensive, it's not an insurmountable expense. All the prior work research and everything can be done by an individual, assuming they're determined and resourceful, although depending on the nature of the patent that could get real tricky.
What you should really ask is, "What's the purpose of getting this patent?" Having a patent doesn't automatically protect you from people stealing the idea, or ensure that you'll be duly compensated if someone decides to use it. The most onerous part of the patenting and licensing process comes after you get the patent - patent battles can go on for years or decades, and there's no guarantee that you'll win any compensation after almost unavoidably spending a ton of money to fight the good fight, often against people with far more resources than yourself.
If you think you can really do something with your invention and are willing to take on the entirely separate and probably even more difficult task of marketing the invention to a company and getting them to distribute it or license it, then a patent is probably something to seriously consider. If you want to patent it because it's your idea and you're proud of it, but you don't necessarily see yourself pursuing it in a commercial sense, then in my opinion you're probably better off just publishing it and taking satisfaction in the fact that you're contributing to the knowledge base.
Develop it AND get a provisional patent (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Develop the thing on your own. If you can't prototype it you don't have anything of interest to the folks you want to sell to.
2) Get a provisional patent - they're cheap and should protect you while trying to pimp your prototype.
3) There is NO market for pure ideas - if that's all you've got, nobody cares enough to pay you for that. Bringing something to market is far-far harder than coming up with an idea.
Being a person whose has ideas and these same questions for a long time, I can say I agree with all the above.
If it's possible for slashdot to agree on anything, it's this. Oh, and you'll get the "patents are evil" stuff too, but that doesn't actually answer your question.
Let the USPTO do the leg work? (Score:2)
I have given this thought in the past and figured that since the USPTO does a lot of legwork to check out patents before granting them, why not let them do the research and then redo the patent filing based upon the rejection? Of course, the speed at which these are processed and public availability of filings would most likely make this simplistic scenario unrealistic. It was a thought, none-the-less.
Patents don't make money (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't expect that you'll make money if you patent an idea-- the patent is only the first step in the process of commercializing the invention, and unless you are active and get your invention out in the world, it won't happen-- it's not true that there are people sitting there and reading every patent as it comes out, saying "oh, there's one I can invest in! I'll pay that guy buckets of money!" You have to do the work (and only ten percent of that work is technical. The majority is networking, social, legal, business, economic, and sales related.)
So: are you ready to do the entrepreneur thing? Long days of working on selling your invention to people with investment money, concatenated with long nights of working to make your invention work better, cheaper, and more reliably?
On the other hand, patenting needn't be terribly expensive if you do most of the grunt work yourself. The patent office has low fees for "small entities," which includes individual inventors.
If you publish, you won't profit directly (although if it's a nobel-prize winning invention, you will), but you will (in principle) prevent somebody else from patenting it. In practice, actually, the patent office is not very good at finding prior art in the literature (to be fair, they have roughly one day per invention to do both the literature search and also the write-up), so what you'll actually accomplish by publishing is to give other parties a piece of evidence that they can use to challenge the validity of the patent. (And, of course, the other parties who have the same idea will probably not have exactly the same idea, and the details of their patent will probably be slightly different, so not the entire patent will be invalidated.)
Disclaimer: IANAL (but, on the other hand, you can google Patent Claim Drafting... [google.com] :)
Angel investor (Score:2)
Most areas have local groups that hook up inventors with angel investors.
In the UK (Score:2, Informative)
Fortunately, they also have a section on protecting your intellectual property [businesslink.gov.uk] that tells you how to do that as well (in terms of patenting, NDAs, Trademarks and Design right). I'm sure the processes aren't quite as straightforward as they look like they are here, but you get the point.
On a personal note - the question of whether to patent is a difficult one. In the intern
Publish! (Score:2)
Open source (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You're asking this on slashdot? (Score:2)
You asking if you should get a patent on a site that is notoriously anti-patent? I'd say you're looking for a certain answer.
At the risk of being modded down, I'm not going to give you that answer. Get the patent. It is good legal protection. It will help if someone else tries to steal your idea and sues you for infringing on the patent they just got. It will help if you later decide to actually get paid for your idea and need to keep others from stealing it.
The patent basically says you thought of thi
Good Ideas are cheap (Score:5, Insightful)
Ideas are a dime a dozen.
Implement something.
There is no sense in rewarding people for thinking up ideas. We simply don't need to, as good ideas will be thought out even if we don't.
The problem is finding people who would implement those ideas.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Ideas are a dime a dozen. Implement something.
There is no sense in rewarding people for thinking up ideas. We simply don't need to, as good ideas will be thought out even if we don't.
The problem is finding people who would implement those ideas.
Agreed.
The notion of patents was created to protect not just ideas, but inventions -- complex collections of moving parts. At the heart of a truly novel invention, there's typically one or two really good ideas, but those ideas are just the beginning of the effort needing to make something that actually works.
Take your idea, and build something from it, and then you'll have something of value to protect. The idea itself isn't worth much.
Patents not for the lone inventor (Score:2)
I used to work for $BIG_COMPANY where we had a process where a team of lawyers and engineers would evaluate everything someone thought remotely patentable, and they would consider whether the patent was worth the time and money (usually several thousand dollars even though they used in-house counsel and did thousands of these a year). The analysis was based not only on the validity of the patent and the value of the innovation covered, but also t
I was just burned by something stupid like this (Score:2)
I spent a good 3 weeks implementing an interesting idea that the person who came up with decided he wanted to patent. My conditions for working on it were that either the thing be treated as a trade secret or that it be allowed to be used in any Open Source application of any kind. He wanted some stupid mealy-mouthed non-commercial clause license.
In my opinion, no matter what the guy thinks of his idea, he will never make any money off of it by trying to keep such tight fisted control over it. His best b
Publish, don't patent (Score:4, Interesting)
The following assumes this is a hardware patent you have in mind.
The days of patenting for the lone inventor are over, seriously. And what if you do patent it? You'll end up spend the bulk of your time, brain power, and meager resources defending it. Unless you have the resources to hire a cadre of lawyers, you won't even be able to defend infringements. And we've not even discussed international patents... which still won't stop Chinese knockoffs (at least not for the foreseeable future).
For insights into why the patent process is seldom useful for individuals:
http://bit.ly/12x7EJ [bit.ly]
http://bit.ly/3glVfj [bit.ly]
There is a lot of money being made in the (e.g.) open-hardware arena: you make a gadget (brilliant idea or not), sell a couple hundred or thousand, make some money and move on to the next thing (see Arduino, Chumby, SeeedStudio, Adafruit, Sparkfun). These guys publish the specs of pretty much everything they make, with enough detail that anybody else could copy it. Yet they are rather successful for small (closely held) businesses.
So my advice is:
Step 1: make
Step 2: publish (gets you publicity for your gadget BTW)
Step 3: open up a store front and sell
Step 4: ??? (there is no step 4)
Step 5: Profit!!!
It's easy to get anything manufactured in small quantities these days. And by the time somebody bothers to clone your idea (which kind proves that you must have made money, in a backhanded compliment kind of way), the hope is you've made some cash, and can spend your time innovating on the next great thing.
This is the secret to happiness my friend.
10% not more (Score:3, Insightful)
Less than 10% of the profit-stream is attributable in my experience to patent technologies. True value is that other 90% brought to the market by the corporation in design, development, marketing and support.
Waaay toooo much emphasis is placed upon technology in the value chain of venture building capital. Toooooo little protection is afforded by USPTO to protect by patent alone the great ideas and inventions.
Sell the idea/tech to the VC community who are best equipped to monetarize a marketplace solution to the problem you've solved. A 10% or less share after all is said and done is huge for the inventor.
Patents can work, but they have to be good ones. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm going to get flamed by the usual losers for this, but anyway...
I hold three software patents. One was sold as part of a deal that made me several million dollars back in the 1980s. One made me $600,000 in licensing fees. I'm pursuing an infringement claim against DoD on the third. I also have another patent pending. I put "Inventor" on my tax return.
Each of these patents was an early patent in an area where previous attempts to solve the problem had failed. In each case, the patented technology came with a working application or a successful demo. So these weren't just "ideas", they were ideas that worked. That's when patents are worthwhile - you've solved a hard problem, you're not with a big enough company to exploit it, and doing a startup doesn't seem to be the right answer.
The key point here is that a patent plus a demo version is more valuable than either alone.
This history isn't all that unusual here in Silicon Valley.
Re:The choice (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh quit the moral bullshit, people need to eat too and rent isn't free.
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Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Oh quit the moral bullshit, people need to eat too and rent isn't free.
I totally agree. If it's a good idea, -someone- is going to make money off it. If he gives his idea away, then everyone but him is going to profit off it. I say he deserves to get his cut.
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If he gives his idea away, then everyone but him is going to profit off it. I say he deserves to get his cut.
I'm having trouble following the logic here. How would he not be able to profit off of an idea that others are able to profit from? Can he not do the same thing with that idea that the others would do, and compete with them?
Ideas aren't physical objects. When you give it away, you still have it.
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"...why the hell should I give it away for free?"
Why should society grant you a temporary monopoly, when you can't even implement it?
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So he should just let others profit off of his invention?
Or maybe some corporation will be kind enough to give him a decent salary meanwhile making millions off of his patent?
Not everyone likes to run a charity like you.
Re: (Score:2)
If it's software, just register a copyright. Thirty five bucks and you're good to go. Plus, your expensive patent only lasts 20 years but your copyright will probably outlive your children.