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Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

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  • From: Robin Millette <millette AT waglo.com>
  • To: Discussion on the Creative Commons license drafts <cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: Stealing ideas?
  • Date: Sun, 14 Nov 2004 03:54:11 -0500

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





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