How Do I Secure An IP, While Leaving Options Open? 281
Tiger4 writes "Let's say I have a photograph, or a television script, or have finally perfected the water-to-gasoline conversion process, or some other piece of non-software but copywritable or patentable IP. I know I want it secured in my name, on this date, in a provable and verifiable way. But being an Open Source, free-to-the world sort of person, I'm willing to share my knowledge to the world, as long as all credit points unambiguously to me. Any attempts at theft could, would, and must be immediately rebuffed by my offer of proof from when I first secured the IP. What, if any, tool or method is available to me in the digital world? MD5 and the like are available to show that copied files are the same as the original source, but they don't show time of authorship unambiguously. The same with Public Key crypto. I could lock it up with a time stamp, but what prevents me from faking the stamp that locks the file? Is there a way to homestead a little chunk of time with my IP's name on it?"
Re:Post (Score:3, Interesting)
Every time I remember sending a registered mail, the post office stamped ink across the seams of the envelope - presumably to ensure that it wasn't opened.
But seriously, Slashdot is the worst place to get good legal advice. Yikes.
That said, there was a good article on the August 11th Talk of the Nation Science Friday called "What Inventors Need to Know". One of the guests emphasis was on securing a way to finance and market your idea rather than the actual protection of IP. But if you're really worried, he suggested getting a temporary patent for $100, which will cover you for a year.
http://www.sciencefriday.com/pages/2007/Aug/hour2
Re:Patent it yourself, or forget the whole thing (Score:5, Interesting)
IP sucks because it doesn't exist.
Look, you either have an object, which is patentable, a work, which can be copyrighted, a symbol, which can be trademarked... or you have an idea, which is only protected until you tell somebody else. If you don't want to share, don't.
The concept of Intellectual Property - i.e. the idea that an abstract construct can have the same properties as a physical construct - is self-contradictory: If it's intellectual, it's not property. The idea has no basis in law, philosophy or history. I've written about this elsewhere [livejournal.com], so I won't waste my breath repeating myself here.
As far as the submitter is concerned, the alternatives are clear: You can protect the work, but not the idea. If it's a song, write it down and/or record it, then copyright it. If it's software, put it in a public repository that has reliable tracking and timestamping, and associate it with an appropriate license. As the owner, you can change this license any way you like in the future, so pick something that suits you for the time being and leave it at that.
not-theft (Score:1, Interesting)
Any intellect or idea is not really a property.
The reason information starts to resemble property is that the temporary monopoly granted by the government has been mis-used and unconstitutionally extended in ways not benefitial to society. The government should not support such profiteering schemes.
Now if you want to know how to protect you idea such that you get rightful recognition and compensation (for a limited amount of time), then that is a worthy goal.
But if you are looking to protect your infinite information monopoly from "theft" forever, I suggest you encrypt it and hide it at the bottom of the ocean.
Use StampYourDocuments.com (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Use StampYourDocuments.com (Score:3, Interesting)
Submit it to usenet.
Seriously, you can't "secure" IP and still make it known to the general public. Ask Coca-cola. They protected their recipe by simply not releasing it. If they had, any protection would have expired long ago.
There is no innate "right" to IP - you only have what the local laws + your enforcement of same can provide. Even then, you can't stop all uses. Fair use comes into play on copyrights; obviousness, prior art, lack of true invention come into play on patents. On top of that, patents are granted by country or by block of countries (if you go through WIPO), so its going to cost some serious loot to get that all-encompassing patent protection.
Think about it. Banting and Best refused to patent insulin. As a result, a lot more people got access to it a lot quicker.
Use the GPL as well (Score:3, Interesting)
Those technical solutions are all very well, and I wish governments would get with the times and offer official digital timestamping services of their own, or bless some of the existing ones. Unfortunately, there's at least one good technical excuse why they need not rush to embrace these new ways. We don't have a proof that P!=NP, and a great deal of crypto (and other things) depends upon the assumption that P!=NP. Would be a bummer to set everything up, get systems, procedures, offices, legal traditions etc. all established, and then someone discovers that P=NP after all. (As if the possibilities from P=NP wouldn't be more than enough compensation for that drawback, but enough digression.) Well of course that's not why governments have not done more of this. It's not like governments waited around for proof that Intellectual Property was a good idea or even made sense before enshrining those concepts in law.
Very good. Why not use the Gnu Public License, or some other similar license? Here [gnu.org] is how the GPL answers your concern.
If you think about it, identification is crucial. Neither copyright nor the GPL could not work if there was no way of attribution. Otherwise, anyone could claim to be the author of some GPLed software, and therefore perfectly within their rights to release "their" code under any other license they want. Imagine if no one could dispute a claim by Tivo that Tivo was the author of all the GPL code in their devices, because there was no legal means to identify who really wrote something.
Note that copyright law, and therefore the GPL, sidesteps all question of proof by technical means. The law dates to times long before there were even the concepts of one way hashes, public key encryption, and digital signatures, let alone equipment capable of doing it. The law simply uses witnesses. There are a few details to try to make witnessing more reliable, such as the process notaries go through to become notaries, or the registration process at a copyright office. The law is not without problems-- for instance there are rumors it is possible to copyright something in country A, and get shafted in country B as someone else copies your stuff and copyrights there in their name before you get around to it.
Re:Use StampYourDocuments.com (Score:2, Interesting)
Second, they do not provide you with cryptographic proof of registration. I don't see what the point of such a service is if they don't provide you with that. Even there "registration certificates" don't seem to actually certify anything since they don't contain their own signature.
The only actual service they seem to provide is sending your signatures to the copyright office periodically. This would be great proof if there was some way to access those signatures if needed. They don't say that there is, and I fear that there may not be. If you can't get to it in order to prove it, I don't see how it does any good.
They do a lot of other things that strongly suggest they are relatively clueless. For example, there certification letter contains a timestamp in Pacific time. Because we set our clocks back once a year, a Pacific time stamp is not reliable for determining which of two things occurred first. The either don't know this or don't care, and I'm not particularly happy with either possibility.
Since most of the actual verification exists only on their servers and you pay a yearly fee, it would appear that if you terminate your service, you lose all your timestamps. They don't say otherwise, and that *really* concerns me.
Note: This is based on a fairly quick scan of their web page. If I misunderstood anything or missed any details, I apologize and will make efforts to correct any factual errors upon notification.