leaking pen wrote:
Patent schmatent. Creative commons license.
My thoughts exactly. This thing is much too big to patent. You wouldn't make any money patenting it. Every industrial corporation on earth would simply steal from you. Give it to the world and then, after you become famous, ask the Congress to give you a reward. That's more or less how things worked out for the Wright bros. in 1917, when Congress swept aside aviation patents to allow war production to proceed unhampered.
Wilbur Wright killed himself from exhaustion in 1912, at age 45. He ran himself ragged trying to secure his patent rights. He won, more or less, but it was a pyritic victory.
Nick Palmer wrote:
Seriously, I've read the other suggestions. They mostly seem to go with full disclosure. This would get the device out into the big wide world but the inventor wouldn't get much reward from his work UNLESS the theory and art behind it is unobvious so that, although people could easily replicate the existing device and generate 500 watts, they would be unable to immediately scale up and build their own 10kw generators without needing access to the intellectual property of the inventor...
I do not think there is the slightest chance of that happening. The world is full of very smart people, and a few months after it becomes generally known that this device works, several hundred thousand of the smartest people around will be working on it. They will discover more about the gadget every week than a lone inventor could discover in a lifetime. This is exactly what happened with airplanes after 1908 and transistors after 1952.
- Jed
