are patents worth?
1,554 Views * 2 views today Hi all, I'm new here and I want to ask you if is worth to patent an idea.
My thought is that it is very complicated and expensive, and a bit useless because if someone copies it I don't have resources to fight back.
what do you think? thanks.
| by: Markus Nolan licence: Creative Commons tags: patents |
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it is complicated and it is exspencive and it works better to scare others away then to fight back. If you have a really good idea you can get the pattent for a lot of money first to get it and then to keep it. but the fighting you can do thru a deal with a lawyer on a no cure no pay basis.It will cost you a lot of time aswel. If you have no plans to actually go on the market with your idea and your not wealthy, I wouldnt get any pattents.
I dont think this is the place to post quesions like this btw, goodluck
Hi Markus, welcome to Idealist,
As Arjen said, patents are useful to scare others, because to use them as a weapon to fight some copy issues you need to have lots of money, time and contacts.
Said that, It tell you that I’m against patents, and in favor to the free flow of knowledge and creations.
I would like you to know that whenever you “create” something you instantly own “all rights” of that creation. This means that if you have an idea and you “make it” or “visualize it” you already have the rights upon that creation. (video, photo, text, drawing…. [only in the USA]).
I’m strongly in favor to creative commons:
Using patents you are not helping the world to evolve…
Imagine if someone patented the wheel? of course he/she would be very rich right now, but we wouldn’t have cars, bicycles or trains…
Is that nice? I don’t think so.
Besides that, nowadays things are changing??¦
Patents were useful “yesterday”, when creation and manufacturing was owned by the companies.
But nowadays the powers are shifting and users/consumers are getting more tools, knowledge and resources to create and decide what they want.
I recommend you (and to all Idealist community) to take a look at this [1 hour] video from a talk given by Eric Von Hippel about “Democratizing Innovation”.
(you can download a creative commons copy of the ???democratizing innovation??? book as a pdf here)
We (consumers) have the power to innovate and we MUST share our ideas among us to CREATE and MAKE what we want.
Lastly, I want to highlight the concept “Prosumer = consumer as a producer”… (wikipedia, flickr….)
Have a look at this video:
*I’m very happy that you used Idealist to post a question, this opens the scope of this site to be more than a “list of ideas” and become a “forum of ideas”.
**if any of you readers (as Arjen) is against of using Idealist as a Forum to post idea-related questions, please let me know and I’ll try to create another channel for this purpose)
finally, if you want to have a good laugh on patents, check the Google patent search engine!
Thanks!
it also depends on what your idea is. you can always have the item mass produced youself and sell yourself