> hope you have protected your concept/idea from "filching",
>concept-theft, etc....This is an open forum here; there are lurkers
>who can steal your ideas..

"Steal your ideas". Sigh.

Many people won't like to hear this, but Ideas really aren't all that valuable. It is a pleasant fantasy to imagine coming up with something really clever, then collecting royalties while other people take on the mundane task of actually implementing and making money with your brilliant idea, but it almost never works out that way in practice, and when it does, it is usually a travesty.

Hard work and good decision making on the thousands of choices in implementation of a product is where real value is created. Robert Heinlein summed it up well: "A good idea is worth exactly one bottle of scotch". In aerospace, there are good ideas overflowing from decades of study that haven't been tested with implementation. One more idea on the pile doesn't make a damn bit of difference. One good implementation of any of the dozens of valid directions available, however, could make all the difference in the world. The value of an idea isn't the value of the product that results from that idea, it is the difference in the values between that project and a hypothetical project that was implemented with an alternate available idea. This delta is much smaller than you might think.

I have done many patentable things in my career, but I have refused to pursue patents on basic moral grounds. I find the entire idea of "knowledge you are not allowed to use (without paying a royalty)" fairly reprehensible -- forcing engineers and scientists to make decisions based on IP instead of effectiveness results in poorer designs for no benefit to anyone.

My software company (Id Software) is currently dealing with a claim from a patent in the 70's that supposedly covers multimedia networked games. The originator of the patent never actually made any game, or even demonstrated that the methods in the patent would function, they just wrote a document covering all the different possible ways they thought it could be implemented. The patent is now owned by a holding company, and they are busy going around trying to extort money from the people that actually went out and added some value to the world. Fucking parasites.

John Carmack
www.idsoftware.com
www.armadilloaerospace.com