this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2024
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What if i have an idea and part of that idea is that it's easy to implement; once the idea is out in the world, it's easy to build alternate clients for it. How do i keep megacorps from using their ressources to take the whole thing over à la Google Chrome? Should i patent the idea?
You can patent it, but here comes the patent trolls.
Patent trolls are companies that generate hundrets of as vague as possible patents and then sue you if you try to patent something similar.
This has also beed done by companies like Apple.
You don't really have a good recourse when you a fighting an army of lawyers.
Additionally depending on where you are patent that you file may be entirely ignored on the other side of the globe.
Chinese companies are infamous for doing that, but history shows that American companies also did this before their economic boom.
Other options are to use some kind of license. Very often this is used when we are talking about code.
Swiss patent office good enough?
But you can't license ideas, right?
If you want to patent something globally you have to patent it in every country, and there are some things like software that aren't patentable in some countries.
A license just tells someone what they can and can not do with something, it doesn't protect an idea. For code it literally just protects the written code, someone could write a clean room clone, i.e. never looking at your code.
No clue, not that deep into the subject.