Nowadays thousands of research work are published in refereed journals, is this enough to protect the copy right of the authors?
What is the best way to invest with new ideas? is a patent necessary to pave the road toward making profits or it is just a privilege?
Depends what you want to achieve. After publishing your invention, it cannot be patented anymore. If you just want acknowledgement then publish. If you want to sell it later, protect it a patent. Usually I follow the PCT route. That one has relative low initial cost. The real bills start coming when protecting in specific countries. But by then you know whether your patent is acknowledged.
I'am agree with Fokko: The first rule on patent application: novelty. If you published before, you can not verify this rule. Publications are common knowledge.
Fokko is correct to ask to clarify your goal.
If you want to make money out of an idea, one has to look from a market perspective.
If it is a good idea publicising the idea will help increase sales. However, it also means that other people can copy it and sell it for themselves.
There are three main methods used to protect the intellectual property:
1). keep it secret, if no one knows they can't copy. particularly useful for embedded software where a chip can be locked to prevent reverse engineering
2). copyright, to prevent anyone copying the form of a product (but this does not protect the function)
3). Patent, which gives the patentee a number of years (usually17) where no one else can copy the features (or form if included in the claims) of an invention.
The idea of Patents is to distribute knowledge to help mankind progress, whilst giving the person that came up with the idea a way to make a living out of it, before others get into the market.
Peer reviewed journal papers are a way improve the academic reputation of researchers, who normally are not in a position to commercially exploit their ideas, or do not want to.
Best Regards
Paul
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