Bill Gates looted and pillaged his way to riches, as well as hustled. He's not retiring off his patents by a long shot.
Erect Torvalds it is
Getting a Software Patent
- Thread starter cardine
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Bill Gates looted and pillaged his way to riches, as well as hustled. He's not retiring off his patents by a long shot.
Erect Torvalds it is
You can right now. Just file a provisional patent for anything and you can say "patent pending" even if you never get a patent on it or the patent is denied. Costs around $150.
I believe that's what a lot of infomercials do, because the products never get to market likely because it's just some bullshit they can sell for a year, then move on to something else.
I disagree with this. The problem isn't that it is in the public's eyes. The problem is the barrier to entry for a product.
An example that we can all relate to is automating xrumer. Although an innovative idea for its time, it did not have a high barrier to entry. Somebody who has only coded for a couple of months could probably load up Sikuli/WinAutomation and do it in a day or two. Same thing for 99% of things in the SEO space (which is all a lot of people here have ever known). And since it's so easy to copy, you soon see a ton of different people with look-a-like products who start offering the same thing.
On the other hand, natural language processing has a very large barrier to entry (the expertise and the manpower required to make it happen), and I can safely say that most people here could not copy that even if they wanted to. There are definitely people who can, but it is 0.1% the amount of most of the other things people are working on. And 6 months from now, that number will be 100x lower. Need proof for that? The average starting salary (fresh out of school) for somebody at Carnegie Mellon who focused on NLP/ML is over $100,000/yr. A high starting salary because few people can do it.
It is very similar to how my Dad (who is in the oil business) had a perfect opportunity to start a trucking company 15 years ago. He turned down that opportunity because of the very low barriers to entry (anybody who can afford a truck can start one) - and nowadays the trucking company is so crowded that nobody makes good money.
I've made a very concerted effort to move into industries and products that have high barriers to entry because that'll lead to higher profits and more stability - there won't be tons of copycats because there won't be a ton of people who can on a whim decide to be a copycat.
And that's the core reason I am looking into patents. To further increase the barriers to entry for others.
???
Sounds like someone is full of them self. You're good man, but c'mon ... you blazed a trail, just like automating xrumer. Now others not only know it's possible, but you just provided a road map for it. They'll do it in a fraction of the time even without a single line of code or the any of the notes you scribbled on a bevnap.
The 4 minute mile sure was a barrier too .. right up to the point that someone broke it, now it's the standard.
Don't doubt my sincerity please, I'm on your side here. Run to the bank ... scream loudly and get shitloads of press. It is definitely innovative, but it's not time to sit on your laurels. You have sharks already in your waters where other saas didn't ... reread that, it's important because their legal > your legal. Trying to hide in court is likely a death sentence.
Many brilliant people struggle their entire life to create something that's worthy of a legacy. If you think this is your Mona Lisa, playing the lawyer card will be like taking a sharpie to it.
To sum it up, IP is for pussies. Man up and keep the innovations coming.
Not saying that I am holier than thou or anything like that. I am saying that it requires $1000 in capital to start a typical SEO business. It costs much more to own your own health product (product capital, floating money). Similarly, it costs a lot more than $1000 to develop something that requires a full time person with certain limited qualifications to work 15 months + have several other employees.
So because it is more expensive for a competitor to show up, less of them will show up. How many people here have access to $1,000 and would like to start a business? How many people here have access to $1,000,000 and would like to start a business? So by building a business that requires $1,000,000 in startup capital you've effectively limited the number of people who can compete with you.
And I don't entirely disagree with you either. I'm not looking to patent anything that currently exists in a product of mine (so I'm definitely not stopping and congratulating myself). I'm looking to patent things that might be in a product of mine in 3-4 months. Although a lot of the current code I have is awesome and proprietary, none of it is worth patenting as of right now.
And of course, I agree, patents don't substitute for innovation. But I work in the system and constraints the government gives me, and if the government gives me a way to protect proprietary technology, I will make use of that. I want to innovate and I also want to be able to properly capitalize on my innovations. It is not all or nothing. If I were to get a patent it wouldn't be getting a patent at the expense of innovating more. And, even if I were armed with a patent, I don't plan on spending the rest of my life litigating. The real reason I would get a patent is if Google decides one day to use the same algorithm in their knowledge graph, they have to worry about me and not the other way around. Not to go litigating after other SEO products.