Navigation | ||
My WhyNot? | ||
Icon Key | ||||||||||||
The community's level of support for this idea is...
| ||||||||||||
Nonpatents | |||||||||||||||||
Many of the people here in this site are tossing out ideas with no hope of getting financial advantage out of it - merely that it might inspire someone to put a useful idea on the market. But even if an idea is useful, there is well over a 90% chance it might fail through bad marketing or ill timed presentation to the public or inferior engineering. But an idea here presented can be patented by someone willing to take a chance on producing it. A patent guarantees the holder(at least to a minimum extent) that no one else will try to develop it and it is considered a fair monopoly. Many very useful products are manufactured with financial success with no patent and reward the manufacturer financially anyway. Why not have a new idea qualified as a non-patent so that anyone can get a crack at producing it without getting entangled with the patent regulations?
sand, Feb 16 2004
What do you think of this idea or comment?
| |||||||||||||||||
I agree
No opinion
I disagreeUsers who liked this idea also liked: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Add your comment
This is an excellent comment. The post of ideas to this site raises to related questions.
1) can the person who posts later patent and then hold up an implementor who used the idea; and
2) can the implementor patent the idea and then keep the poster from implementing.
The second problem is not likely to happen because to be patentable an idea must be a non-obvious improvement over the prior art. The public posting to this site changes the prior art and thus preempts the implementor from patenting someone elses idea (unless the process of implentation represents a non-obvious improvement).
The first problem of the poster patenting and holding up the implementor might be solved by having the posters promise (as a condition of posting) that they will not hold up an implementor who uses the idea.
But the nonpatent idea raises yet another possibility. That it might be nice if the poster committed not to patent and to keep the patentability open as an extra carrot to for the implementor. This resembles an idea of Gideon Parchomovsky who suggested that initial innovators might intentionally claim a smaller patent scope in order to encourage complementory follow innovation. But it is hard to implement on this site -- because publicly reporting an idea changes the "prior art."
This is done all the time. For example, IBM and AT&T have "Technical Disclosure Bulletins" specifically for the purpose of placing an idea in the public domain- to prempt someone else from holding it against the company. Often the idea won't justify the cost of filing and maintaining a patent (for a large company about $25K), while defending the company from a patent holder nuisance suit can cost hundreds of thousands. So its simpler to "give it away"