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Table of contents

Table of Contents

Child pages

Child pages (Children Display)

How to protect your IP from your current employer


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Licensing your invention

Others' experiences with licensing

  • B.F. Skinner
    • He had a bad experience trying to license his teaching machine invention to IBM and others. Ditto with his aircrib idea.

Books


Patent your inventions

Important concepts

Others' experiences with patents and protecting their IP

  • Examples of people who were confronted by others trying to copy their inventions
    • Steve Wozniak
      • "Right after we officially incorporated as Apple Computer Corporation in early 1977, Mike had us go down to Beverly Hills and talk to patent lawyers. They said that any ROM chips we had around that had any code in them—any PROMs, any EPROMs—every single one of them needed a copyright notice. I had to put "Copyright 1977" on them all.

        I sat down with one of the patent lawyers, Ed Taylor, and went through all the clever things in my design that other people definitely wouldn't have done before. How I did the color, for instance, and how I did the timing for the DRAM.

        We ended up with five separate parts of a patent. It was a good, secure patent that was going to wind up being one of those patents in history that become very, very valuable. It was going to be the heart of lawsuits to come. For instance, it would come in handy when people tried to copy, or clone, the Apple Il and other products after that.

        Back then, there were no ideas of how software could be patented. This was such new stuff. We found out that copyrights were a better way to deal with people copying our technology. Copyrights were an easier, quicker, and less costly way than patents to stop people who tried to copy our computer outright."
      • "Remember when I told you Mike had us copyright the software? Well, what a good move. After the CES, we found out about a new computer from a company called Franklin. It supposedly looked a lot like ours.

        It arrived at our building, and it looked so much like the Apple Il I was very interested. I thought, Hey, great. They copied my design. I wonder how much of it they copied. I didn't expect they would've copied much of it. I figured engineers are trained to invent and design their own things. An engineer would never look at another person's design and copy it, would they? No, that's what they go to school for. They go to learn how to design their own things.

        I walked over to the main building to look at it. There it was, and I was shocked. The printed circuit board inside was exactly the same size as ours. And every single trace and wire was the same as ours. It was like they'd taken our Apple Il board and Xeroxed it. It was like they d just Xeroxed a blank Apple Il board and put in the exact same chips. This company had done something no honorable engineer would've done in their effort to make their own computer. I couldn't believe it.

        Well, at the next computer show I attended, I immediately went up to their booth and told the president, who was in the booth, "Hey, this is just a copy of ours." I was all upset. "This is ridiculous," I told him. "You copied our board. You copied it. Which means I am your chief engineer, and you don't even give me credit for being your chief engineer." The president looked at me and said, "Okay. You're our chief engineer." And I was happy and walked away, but now that I think of it, I should've asked him for a salary!

        We did sue them later, and I found out their argument for doing it. They claimed there were legal reasons that gave them the right to copy the Apple Il. They were arguing that because there was such a huge software base of programs for the Apple Il, it was unfair to exclude them. They claimed they had a right to build a computer that could run that software base, but that argument sure didn't make sense to me.

        The case took a couple of years. They lost, and we did get money from them. Just a few hundred thousand dollars, not the millions I thought it was worth. But it was enough to stop them."
  • Examples of people who did not patent their inventions and suffered as a result
    • Edwin Drake - The first man to successfully drill for oil in the United States
      • "Drake is famous for pioneering a new method for producing oil from the ground. He drilled using piping to prevent borehole collapse, allowing for the drill to penetrate further and further into the ground. (...) Within a day of Drake's striking oil, Drake’s methods were being imitated by others along Oil Creek and in the immediate area. (...) while his pioneering work led to the growth of an oil industry that made many people fabulously rich, for Drake riches proved elusive. Drake did not possess good business acumen. He failed to patent his drilling invention, and proceeded to lose all of his savings in oil speculation in 1863. He was to end up as an impoverished old man" (Source)

Getting a patent on your own

Books

Web articles

  • Nolo - Getting a Patent on Your Own
    • Do you need to hire a lawyer to apply for a patent?
      • In most cases, the answer is "no." You can do it yourself, and save thousands of dollars on attorneys' fees.
    • To obtain a patent, you need to:
      • make sure your invention qualifies for a patent, and
      • be able to describe all aspects of your invention.
    • Steps to Filing a Patent Application
      • 1. Keep a Careful Record of Your Invention
        • Record every step of the invention process in a notebook.
          • Describe and diagram every aspect and every modification of the invention
            • including how you came up with the idea for it.
        • Depending on the invention, you may also want to build and test a prototype.
        • Document all of these efforts.
          • Sign and date each entry.
          • Have two reliable witnesses sign as well.
      • 2. Make Sure Your Invention Qualifies for Patent Protection
      • 3. Assess the Commercial Potential of Your Invention
      • 4. Do a Thorough Patent Search
      • 5. Prepare and File an Application With the USPTO


    • Jimmy Wales:
      Before I answer your question directly (and I promise I will) let me just offer the opinion

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    • that young entrepreneurs often think this is a real problem which faces them, when in fact the opposite problem is much much much more likely to be the case:

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    •  far from other people seeing your thing as "legen-wait for it-dary" as you put

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    • it :-), no one will care about you or your idea at all.

      Notice that this is more true the more paranoid you are about it. Just a few days ago I got a 3 page pitch letter from someone who simply described to me in stereotypical buzzwords how I could add synergistic brand value to their revolutionary value-add concept that would blah blah blah - 3 pages with absolutely no information whatsoever about what the hell the person wants to do.

      I remember when I first had the idea for a freely licensed encyclopedia written by volunteers. I remember a feeling of urgency and panic because the idea seemed so obvious that I thought lots of people would be competing with me, so I rushed out and hired Larry Sanger to work for me as editor in chief of the project, and we launched Nupedia as quickly as possible. Nearly two years later, with the project generally unsuccessful at that point, no one else was competing with us at all. My panic about someone rushing to compete with me was not justified.

      Now, to answer your question directly because, despite my view that in general this isn't really the problem that you face, sometimes it is, and it's worth a few words about that.

      First, if your idea is the sort of thing that could be reasonably patented, then you can work to file a patent. I'm not a big believer in this for most things (particularly not software or dot-com ideas, where I find patents to be useless for protecting startups and pernicious for the industry as a whole), but if your legendary concept is a genuine scientific/engineering invention, then by all means, get a patent.

      Second, and I'm stealing this line from Facebook (probably Mark Zuckerberg said it first, I don't know): Move fast and break things.

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    •  This is particularly important if there are "network externalities" in your idea, or any other kind of genuine "first mover advantage". (Though notice: both those concepts are much much much overused.)

      Just get moving and don't look back.

      Ok, so that is my direct answer, but now I want to go back and remind you of my first answer. THIS IS PROBABLY NOT THE PROBLEM THAT YOU REALLY HAVE. Far far more entrepreneurs have lost out on great opportunities because they were so paranoid about someone stealing their idea that they were unable to raise capital, unable to get started, unable to actually DO anything.

Examples of patents