Intellectual Property - Inventor Secrecy

Transcript

let me talk a little bit about inventor paranoia now i was at the national association of patent practitioners conference a few years ago and the ron reardon was giving the keynote speech and he began with a little joke he said there are two types of inventors out there the paranoid and the more paranoid and all the patent attorneys and the pad agents we were rolling in the aisles that was the funniest thing we'd ever heard we thought it was really funny i tell that same joke in a lot of my adult school classes and people kind of look at me like well that's not funny of course that's the way it is of course we're paranoid everyone's going to steal our inventions and it's good to be paranoid to a certain extent but don't be paranoid to the point where it's going to negate any possibility you're ever going to have of making any money off your invention because you're right some people are going to steal ideas but they're much more likely to copy successful products than they are to steal ideas if you think about it everybody in the manufacturing business they know that just being able to make a product is no guarantee of success so they're much more likely to just sit back and wait until you have proven that the product has has legs and it's going to sell then they'll copy it which is why you want to get patent protection to keep them from copying it now the other thing too just as a general kind of philosophical tidbit here is that you want to you want to think about whether or not you want to go to your grave with your invention in your mind happy that nobody ever stole it from you or whether you'd like to get out there and you know give it a try because from what i see nobody has ever succeeded who hasn't spent some money trusted some people and taken some chances i mean there's just no way that you're going to have an invention it's going to magically patent itself and then some rich millionaire is going to fly over in a helicopter and drop a 10 million suitcase on you it's just not going to happen you're going to have to take some chances and again that's your choice go to your grave with your idea and at least no one will have ripped you off or give it a shot try to make some money