Patents, the biggest waste of time, energy and resources an inventor can do.
Whenever an inventor talks to anyone about their ideas, that other person invariably tells them they should get a patent. I know that these people are usually caring and genuinely desire to help. But, in reality, what they recommended is pure evil.
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The beginning of Don Lancaster's infamous article about the realities of The US patent system. The Case Against Patents |
The best description of a patent is that it is a $5,000 gun, but the bullets cost a million dollars a piece.
A large corporation doesn't care about your patent. They will not buy it. They will not honor it. They would rather spend $100,000 busting your patent than $10,000 to buy it. And bust your patent they will. Or they will do something even worse, they will drag your court case out for decades. Or they will do something even worse than that, they will counter sue for all of their lost profits due to your filing a false patent case.
Full document here
And little guys don't care about patents either. The not atypical story is that an inventor gets a great idea, patents it and starts building it. His neighbor sees it, thinks that's great, and starts manufacturing them too. The inventor goes to court to stop the neighbor. He wins after much time and money. The copy-cat files bankruptcy. The inventor doesn't get a dime. And the copy-cat moves across the street and starts manufacturing again. At this point the inventor is back to square one. He has to go start the entire court process over.
The medium sized guy who is actually in the business of producing legitimate products is the only ones who really care about patents. And they care from a stand point of being afraid of having patents used against them. They are in a position of losing a lot of time and money because of some lawyer suing them. If they win, they lose a lot of money. If they lose, their entire company will be destroyed. And these people are trying to be legit and on the up and up.
Back to the little inventor. Unless the product you have invented is going to produce more than a million dollars in net profit, it isn't worth getting a patent. But, there is all kinds of other things that you can do that are actually far superior.
One thing is to file the patent (It costs $500) and write on your product Pat. Pend. Which everyone takes to mean patent pending, but actually it is meaningless. And if you have filed the patent, whether it is approved or not, you are legally covered. Of course, you are never going to court over the product, because you know that the products life span is short. So, once you got this product selling, you are already working on another.
Another thing to do is to fully publish your invention. Don Lancaster recommended writing a magazine article telling everyone how to build it themselves. Which usually ended up with the inventor actually getting more job offers than they could shake a stick at.
An offshoot that occurred today on Steemit.com is that you can publish it on steemit. Steemit being an immutable block chain can verify to any court that you had prior work (what you need to defend against a patent law suit). What used to be for inventors a lot of jumping through hoops (getting your document certified by a notary and then mail it to themselves for an affirmed date), is now as easy as pushing post on steemit.
All ideas are not really our own. Ideas come into this planet and are heard by several people (who are listening) at the same time. The Wright Brothers took their first powered flight only two weeks before a Frenchman did. So, don't by into the hype about trying to keep your idea secret. In an actual business, the product is only the tip of the iceberg. Marketing, distribution and cash flow are far more important. Besides, competition is not bad, it actually helps a lot. If you have a brand new product that no one has ever heard of, you have to go through a lot of effort to get people to know that it exists. 3M almost failed with sticky notes, until they did a national ad campaign about how to use them. So, don't be afraid to get them out there.
But, if you are still really afraid of anyone knowing about it, you can post it, and then immediately edit it to be something else. It will still be on the block chain, but you will have to be specific in going and finding it, using a tool like steemd.
So, be bold in this new era of thought creation. And use steemit as a way to publish prior work to save you from any future patent hassles. And stay away from The US patent system. It is really one of the most evil inventions of the thing we call govern-cement.