Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Robin Millette <millette AT waglo.com>]

Evan Prodromou wrote:
> On Sun, 2004-14-11 at 01:31 -0500, Scott Rubin wrote:
>
> > Ok, so I have a blog, and I have it licensed with the 
> > Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 license. It is very good.

> > But what if in my 
> > blog I write down a new idea I came up with. Say a truly original idea for a new 
> > product. If someone reads my blog and makes that product before I do, what 
> > rights do I have?
>
> You need to seek patent rights over your ideas. Under the copyright
> regime, you don't have control over the ideas themselves -- just over
> their expression. If you patent your ideas, then you can control them
> and sue people who implement them. Yay for you!

I saw [1] the reverse not to long ago, or sort of... A Quebec inventor 
[2] was seeking advice on the best way to protect his idea and prototype 
for a small car he had designed. He quickly found out how expensive it 
would be to patent his idea, and how little it would protect him if in 
fact his idea wasn't so original - for example, someone could have 
published such an idea in an old Popular Mechanic.

Long story short, he was convinced to write a small book [3] explaining 
his concept, and thus preemptively preventing anyone from patenting it - 
or at least to break any such patent in the future.

[1] http://www.ztele.com/grille/episode.jsp?1d3p1s0d3=200256069
[2] Gérard Labranche
[3] 37 page book: "Autologic: This invention could save the planet" 
isbn: 2980662011

[snip]

> The bottom line: keep your blog amateurish and dumb. It's simple
> self-defense!

Evan! :)

--
Robin Millette, aka oqp http://rym.waglo.com/wordpress/
http://www.salondulivrelibre.info/ 18 au 22 novembre, Montréal