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The motivation for you to patent is that someone else can file before you even if you invented it first. That's new in the United States and common in other jur

by sunir 15y ago

The motivation for you to patent is that someone else can file before you even if you invented it first. That's new in the United States and common in other jurisdictions. You make money by licensing your inventions to companies that have means to create a product. You can use trade secrets and copyright to protect your invention. You don't need patents. However, in the defensive patent world, you should still get one in case they steal your idea. What you'd be prevented from doing is creating an expansive definition of a market. That's not crazy talk. In the case of the Lodsys patents, Novell has filed that for prosecution history estoppel, which my reading of Groklaw might be because the original patents were filed with caveats they would only apply to a restricted market (probably set-top pay-per-view TV boxes). http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20110708021518693 http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20110708021518... I think this constraint on patents should be explicit and part of the law. i.e. a Pharmaceutical patent should declare it is for the pharmaceutical industry; if material engineering could use the same organic compound, that is sufficiently novel and non-predatory of the original patent holder. However, it's unclear in the current law whether or not the new use could pass.

anamax 15y ago
> You make money by licensing your inventions to companies that have means to create a product. That's assuming that I have something to license. Abolishing patents or requiring me to practice means that I don't. > You can use trade secrets and copyright to protect your invention. Neither one applies to processor features. For example, I invented a new way to do branch prediction. Copyright would apply to any documents that I produce or to the mask that someone used to implement that feature, but a new processor, by definition, wouldn't use that same mask or even a portion thereof. As to copyright, a processor company can implement without copying any document (and even if someone did copy, the damages are at most $250k if I can prove it, which is going to be expensive). They merely need to read whatever description I provide. For similar reasons, trade secret is a non-starter. (You have to disclose many processor features to make them useful.) > What you'd be prevented from doing is creating an expansive definition of a market. Except that I'm not trying to do that. I'm trying to be compensated for inventing a new way to do branch prediction (for example).

by sunir 15y ago

anamax 15y ago

> You make money by licensing your inventions to companies that have means to create a product. That's assuming that I have something to license. Abolishing patents or requiring me to practice means that I don't. > You can use trade secrets and copyright to protect your invention. Neither one applies to processor features. For example, I invented a new way to do branch prediction. Copyright would apply to any documents that I produce or to the mask that someone used to implement that feature, but a new processor, by definition, wouldn't use that same mask or even a portion thereof. As to copyright, a processor company can implement without copying any document (and even if someone did copy, the damages are at most $250k if I can prove it, which is going to be expensive). They merely need to read whatever description I provide. For similar reasons, trade secret is a non-starter. (You have to disclose many processor features to make them useful.) > What you'd be prevented from doing is creating an expansive definition of a market. Except that I'm not trying to do that. I'm trying to be compensated for inventing a new way to do branch prediction (for example).