From: Samantha Atkins (samantha@objectent.com)
Date: Fri Jul 19 2002 - 21:42:16 MDT
Brian D Williams wrote:
>>From: Christian Szegedy <szegedy@or.uni-bonn.de>
>
>
>>I have two choices:
>>1) I keep my idea for myself. (And wait for the (quite
>>hypothetical) possibility to turn it into money.)
>>2) I give it away for free.
>
>
>>(Brian chose option 1, I would choose 2)
>
>
> Actually it's a bit more complicated than this. Under U.S. patent
> law anything you come up with belongs by law to the company you are
> working for, and for two years after you leave.
That is not so in software at least. The actual code belongs to
the company but the software conceptual design itself does not.
Otherwise programmers would have to leave their brains at the
door every time they changed jobs.
>
> I actually submitted this idea to a program (Focus On Revenue) that
> was specifically looking for new revenue sources. I was trying to
> make the company money.
>
> When it came out later as "privacy manager" I sent all my original
> material to the CEO in E-mail since we were applying for a patent
> on this idea and since I had suggested it years earlier this could
> be used to vindicate apriori claims. He replyed that he would
> forward it to the people concerned and that was the last I ever
> heard.
>
If this was software one way to protect yourself is to copyright
. Copyright is much easier and cheap to secure and to protect.
>
>>The bottomline is: The current patent laws have two main effects:
>
>
>>1) Discourage private people to communicate their ideas.
>
>
>>2) Help the big companies to maintain their monopolies.
>
>
>>Is it really worth, or even moral?
>
>
> I would say 1) discourage people from communicating their ideas.
>
> I'll tell another story.
>
> Right after the "call blocking refusal" idea, I was watching the
> advancement of high speed data lines, and everybody started talking
> about Video-on-demand.
>
> I saw how this wasn't going to happen without some major changes
> because it was going to be decades before the bandwidth was there.
>
> But I saw something that it seemed people missed, I thought there
> was a market for music-on-demand, and we were just experimenting
> with DSL at the time. My idea was that we would have centralized
> servers, probably in every C.O. (this was before MP3) and we could
> offer this immediately in two formats.
>
> The at home version I called "Personnal Radio Station" and the
> commercial version was "The Universal Jukebox". The idea was that
> you could litterally have every piece of music ever recorded at
> your fingertips. It could be very cheap, because it essentially
> turned us instantly into a Neilsen ratings like company, big value
> added stuff.
>
> I wrote it all up and submitted it and of course got rejected
> again.
>
> A few years latter I saw the Universal Jukebox idea featured in a
> QWEST commercial, then MP3 came along and we know the rest.
>
I think if you write these things up and notarize/copyright them
before submitting them you can easily prove prior art,
especially if the idea is published to an accessible place.
- samantha
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:15:35 MST