Patents and IP

I think i may have a highly marketable idea..not sure if anybody has thought of it before though. How do i go about seeing if somebody had the idea before me, and if nobody has, isnt there some way to secure the idea with a patent or intellectual property law? If someone could point me in the right direction it'd be really helpful

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1) Work out your idea fully. Get it all on paper, and lock one copy in your great-grandmother's tomb. Make sure your idea has somethign new and innovative in it. Make sure you can show that it's your work.

2) Get onto your local patent office or a patent lawyer. They'll check to see if anything else has been done before like that. if it has, you're out of luck. If it's truly oringinal...

3) You buy patents. There is no such thing as an international patent. What you do is buy separate patents for each country you suspect might be able to copy and produce your work. For example, a USA computer chip maker would buy patents in Taiwan, Japan, USA, a few others, and not worry about countries that coudn't make it. Patents last a limited time; you get 20 years or so to have a monopoly and make back the R&D money plus profit, then anyone can have it. But you only get that time IF you continue to buy the patents on your idea for those years. If you stop paying after two years, then anyone can have it at that time.

 

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Ok, suuuuuuuuuuuuuure...

Just send me a private message or email explaining your idea in detail and I will find out if anyone has had it prior to you...

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Its not that big of an idea...the ideas been around for a long time, sort of. Anyway, they might have it in other countries, but not in the US. I'm gonna do a little searching on the net though to see if anyone else has tried to get patents or anything like that for a similar idea. Problem is, even if it is original..i dont exactly have a __________ plant in my bedroom

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Though it'd be easy enough to find a general directions and the basic parts. Thanks for the help Adam

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intellectual property rights, patents, and other related objects are nothing but inventions of modern capitalists to further firm up their control of technology. they incorporated terms like tampering, piracy, etc. into the justice system to discourage technology transfers that could put their competitors to the advantage over them. thus in this context ipr laws must not be taken too seriously if what we want is a so-called knowledge society where scientific knowledge must diffuse in the fastest pace possible.

 

kgargar

Bollocks. If I spend five years and heaps of my money developing something nifty, I want a monopoly for a while to recover my money and make a profit for my time and effort. That's what patents are for.

 

Don't you think that the 'modern capitalists' deserve to be compensated for the money that they invest in research?

 

many of those who has access to the internet are really for preserving the kind of society we have. that's expected. can't blame you guys for that belief. i agree with you in a sense that current trend in scientific researches are motivated and, well, sponsored by large capitalists. i'm aware of that since i'm into that endeavour also--that is, we would not have researches in our lab if not for funding from these capitalists. but we cannot also blame those poor (literally) people who are suffering because of this highly self-centered efforts for scientific advancement.

the message is that science can also advance, contrary to the current notion, through other reasons aside from private profit. one nuclear physicist (Dr. Joan Hinton) had long abandoned the type of scientific research that is profit-driven. she has continously advocated for a science for the people. i believe that science can advance (in a pace much much faster than it is advancing in the profit-driven society) if it's development is motivated by popular demand (that is, not just of a few) based on what is necessary. i believe too that the realization of that kind of society is inevitable.

 

I think you have no idea what's actually going on in the world.

1) Many scientific advances/breakthroughs come not from large corporations but from university research.

2) I am not a large corporation. If I spend my spare time throughout my degree developing something, then I want money for it, for the time and effort I've put in.

 

So...you're saying that if someone spends millions of dollars and thousands of man hours developing some new technology they don't deserve to be compensated for it? Am I understanding this correctly?

 

an alternative


http://www.petitiononline.com/pasp01/petition.html

http://antipatents.8m.com/software-patents.html

http://www.researchoninnovation.org/patent.pdf

http://www.opensource.org/

http://www.fsf.org/

http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html

http://www.advogato.org/

pros and cons

 

But are those reasons enough to give us all the answers from science that we need fast enough for us to make use of them? Or will they only give us the answers to popular questions in a haphazard timeframe?

 

Unfortunately... Nowadays as an inventor you can only loose

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Either your ideas and inventions will be stealed usually by someone of those who promised to help. Or by your employer claiming all ideas of their employees are automatically the company's property. Or by similar scenarios...

Or and if you decide to try to get those patents and such all by yourself all your further inventive genius will die during the stoney and timeconsuming process.

And even then and often somebody suddenly comes out of the dust from some remote places on earth to steal your idea anyway by claiming they had the same idea before.

And the newest threat on top of all that are the growing science restricting attitudes around the world of governments at one side and large corporates at the other - now virtually destroying even the last remaining resorts of playing fields that were so important to freely develop and try new things out...

 

i agree with raimon. that is why there should be a total overhaul of the present culture in the so-called scientific community. the current tradition in science and technology sector must be changed from a parochial direction serving only those who can give us big bucks and extravagant compensation to the direction where scientific achievements and breakthroughs are motivated by the demand of the majority of the society.

the manhattan project way back world war 2 era is a classic example of an endeavor against the principle of "science and technology for the people". indeed it was a convergence of brilliant minds but it culminated in the annihilation of hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings.

the present research and development in war technologies are not aimed at serving the needs of the people but in destructing them in order to protect the interest of a few. this madness must be stopped for the international society to evade extinction.

 

I have a feeling that the million or so allied soldiers whose lives were saved by the atomic bombing of Japan might not have objected. For that matter, I imagine that at the time the vast majority of North America and Europe would have supported the project if they had know about it.

You don't consider protection from foreign invasion to be one of the 'needs of the people'?

 

After at first being absolutely paralyzed and speechless about the idea
that anybody could possibly still justify that awful atomic bombing of Japan -

I decided to answer with an excerpt from

PLAY LITTLE VICTIMS
(by Kenneth Cook)

which is a story of a planet overpopulated by mice
who for the solution to their problem look to the practices of humans:


"As I suspected the answer is quite simple:

The problem is not that there are too many mice
but that mice live too long.

--> OBJECTION: What do you propose doing about that? Educating mass suicide?

Suicide is wrong. It is against the word of Man.
That Man too faced this problem of overpopulation.

--> He did?

Not quite to the same extend that we do.
Because Man's world seems to be much larger than ours.
But the problem was exactly the same in kind - it differed only in degree.

--> And he had a solution?

HE DID!

WAR!

--> War??

War!

--> But wouldn't that be dangerous?

Not at all.
It provides a lot of healthy exercise,
creates employment, boosts the economy,
and if enthusiasticly persued: eliminates the population problem

--> But wouldn't a lot of mice get killed?

Of course.
That's the point.
As the population grows we'll have bigger and better wars to keep it in check.

--> But that surely is against the Word of Man - to KILL?!

Not at all.
If the cause is just Man was always doing it.
So it MUST be right.

--> And Man conducted wars as a means of population control?

I'm certain of it.
There was no other possible reason for them.

<< Silence - The Board's looking worried >>

--> Would we have to take part in these wars?

Who?

--> Us?

The Board?

--> Umm... yes?

No. Definitely.

The Board of a State does not take part in wars.

It organizes them."

 

What was the point of that story? That war is bad? Does anyone really disagree about that? What the heck is it supposed to prove? It doesn't make any contentions or offer any evidence to support its position, so it's pretty much meaningless in the context of a debate. If I'm missing some sort of deep philosophical meaning here, feel free to explain it to me.

In any case, I wasn’t trying to justify the atomic bombing of Japan, I was merely trying to point out that developing technology based on the ‘will of the people’ is often a bad idea because people are often fickly, stupid, and immoral. The fact that the general populace supported the atomic bombing of Japan was merely an example of this.