If you're not looking for a patent yourself, but want to make sure that
nobody else pulls one on you, you may want to look into the USPTO's
Statutory Invention Registration program. It basically creates a public
domain patent of your invention so nobody else can "invent" it and claim
priority. And it's cheap (something like $100 IIRC).
Sean Crandall
Uwe Thiem wrote:
On 16 September 2005 04:31, Raphael Melo de Oliveira Bastos Sales wrote:
Hi everyone,
I work with biotech and for about an 1 year I've been working on a
web interface for genome/proteome data analysis. And I'd like to make
it free software. But I still have doubts about legal problems I might
face and about intellectual property.
Basically, I don't want to restrict people on using and
contributing with source or whatever, but don't want anyone taking
credit for my work or pateting it and sending me a cease-and-desist
letter.
If anyone has any insight, references or links on this subject,
please let me know.
1. Step
You make sure the stuff is your. So you stamp a copyright message all over it.
Basically, you put a copyright notification in each and every file. Now you
have made clear it is *your* intellectual property.
2. Step
You have to put it under an OSS license that suits you best. I guess the two
most widely used OSS licenses are the General Public License (GPL) and the
BSD license. There are quite some differences between them. In a nutshell:
The GPL does not allow to include any of your stuff in a piece of software
that is not under the GPL. In other words, Whoever wants to build software
based on yours has to make the result OSS under GPL as well. The BSD license
basically allows any use of your software as long as the copyright remains
unchanged (which prevents anyone from patenting it) and the result credits
you.
All that said, if someone with a lot of money grabs your stuff an - say -
patents it you still have to challenge them in court which can take
considerable time and money. The GPL has a slight advantage in this case
because the Free Software Foundation (FSF) will help you legally.
You should read through the available licenses even if they are a boring
read. ;-)
Uwe
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