Expert: Rene Hasekamp - 7/18/2010

Question
I am to poor to buy patents but I have several idea which I think could be profitable if patented. I also have a couple of ideas I don't really care if they are profitable I think they would improve the world but don't know about how to get them noticed.

Anyway, my big question is this, if I come up with a good idea and I can't afford to patent it, in the UK I believe I have copyright to anything I create and if I wrote what was essentially a patent and publicly published it but never applied for one, then would my copyright be "prior art" and "obviousness" therefore preventing someone with money but no good ideas from profiting from my ideas as their patent could be invalidated (it's obvious - look he already did that idea).

Or maybe there are venture capitalists who help support people in such ventures but I don't know how to engage with them.

Answer
Hello,

You are right that everything you "create" is copyright to you, but that is not the case in the technical field, where patents come in. Copyright exists only for "works of art", in a broad sense. Technical inventions are definitely excluded here!

But it is also true that any publication of an invention is good enough to prevent others to be able to patent this invention.
Any publication, in whatever medium, belongs to the "state of the art" and makes later patent applications obvious or even not novel for the matter disclosed in that publication. .

If you want to use this method to prevent patenting by others, you should best publish your inventions in some place where the patent examiner is likely to find them. So the best place would be a technical magazine in the field of your invention and the worst would be some private website.

Especially for websites it is very difficult to determine the publication date. And private websites are very unlikely to be found by a patent examiner.

However, if you want to publish your inventions cheaply, another possibility is to bring your publication to the attention of the patent examiner by writing a letter to the patent office, after a patent application has been filed. But obviously in that case you would have to follow all patent applications in that field.

Hope this helps.
Regards,
Rene Hasekamp.