It’s a common movie trope, that someone in the right place at the right time will come up with a brilliant idea, and be richly rewarded for it.
But in real life, although we have protections for creative works (copyright) and inventions (patents), we (USA here) don’t as far as I know really have legal protection for those sorts of ideas.
So what do clever people with clever ideas do to make money off them? They can’t present the idea for sale without essentially giving it away.
In case anyone is wondering what I mean, there are things that arent protected, like targeted business strategies (think Working Girl), product ideas that aren’t novel enough for a patent, and brilliant ideas that would be protected intellectually but someone else already has the rights.
The gist being, if you have an idea that can’t be reserved legally, but also can’t be pulled off on your own.
Since no-one’s answering I may as well jump in with a WAG:
There are other alternatives between get rich and have idea stolen. I think in most cases if you present your idea formally, with prototypes where applicable, and have some legal representation you have a good chance of getting a payday.
Not because your idea is legally protected, but because it’s not worth it to the corporation to take the risk.
Your payday however is likely to be a fixed sum vastly smaller than the value of the idea to the corporation.
I think the only way to make real money from a non-patentable idea is to do all the legwork yourself – organize manufacturing, distribution etc, and try to make money quickly before your idea is inevitably copied.
You can’t protect an idea, and ideas aren’t worth anything. Even patentable ideas aren’t really protected for some clever individual, unless you consider spending $25,000 and 5+ years obtaining the patent only to obtain the right to spend another $100,000+ and 5+ years litigating the infringement on your patent.
There’s no single fool proof way to make your valuable idea defensible, but a whole slew of difficult techniques one must employ, all of which involve turning your idea into a marketable reality.
For instance, your idea might be very complicated and you’re one of few people who understand the science behind it.
Also, you thought of it first so you have a 9 month head start on turning it into a marketable product. So hopefully you’ll capitalize on that and get it done first.
And you convinced a few expert marketers and manufacturers to team up with you, and they’re incredibly good at selling and building things, so that makes it more likely you can protect your clever idea.
And so on and so forth.
Ultimately the best way to protect your clever idea is to turn it into a product or service that dominates its market place. Nothing is keeping new people from doing Web video, and in fact plenty of companies besides Youtube do it, but Youtube is by far the dominant Web video site because they got in first and established themselves as the de facto Web video provider.
An idea may or may not be patentable. It used to be that it had to be a device or physical process to be patentable, and you had to have a functional prototype; but in the last 2 decades, business methods and software are also patentable. Patents are perilously close to patenting ideas. (Think 1-click ordering…how clever and orginal is that??) OTOH, the jar for paperclips with a magnet on the rim was also patentable, and obvious as it is today, it wasn’t back then. Once you have created and applied for a patent, you are covered.
The problem is, the next step to getting rich is to get a good deal with someone who wants to use your idea to produce the product - or you do it all yourself. It’s getting to the point where to make and distribute across the country, you need some serious equipment.
If your idea is cultural - movie, song, story, etc. - then only the specific implementation is protected, by copyright. You can’t copyright the idea of little starships fighting each other after being launched from a mother ship. (Although, God knows Lucas tried to sue the original incarnation of Battlestar Galaxative). A clever idea “my superhero dresses in a bat costume” is not copyrightable, but if you publish a story about it, the story is - and the more firmly the character is embedded in the culture, the more specific the character is protected too.
The point is, a simple idea is not a guarantee of riches, and an idea cannot be protected. You have to do something about it.
With the floundering, out of their depth patent office, and the willingness of filers to ignore or gloss over prior art, yes, protecting even a patented idea can become difficult and expensive.
Not a patent lawyer but I believe the only time the patent office requires you to need to have made a functionable prototype is when you attempt to patent a perpetual motion machine.
I’ve seen several articles by science fiction authors who complain of the obnoxious audience member who comes up to them at some event and says “here’s my idea for a story, what say you write it and we split the proceeds?” The typical answer is, “no you see if you can write the sotry and if it even sells.” there’s a lot more to a story or novel than the basic idea.
I think I read the “functional prototype” thing several decades ago; the point was you needed more than an idea, that you had to demonstrate your idea would work.
I sincerely hope you can’t simply patent wild-ass guesses in the hope that if one works or is close you’ve hit a jackpot. And… it has to be possible with current technology.
There’s no legal protection for the sorts of things the OP describes, because they are literally worthless. Coming up with an idea is easy. Making it work is harder, and making a profit from that is harder still.
If an idea is patentable, you can shop it around with people you think might like to license it, and you have a year from the time you start disclosing it (meaning showing the idea to people who are not contracted to keep it a secret, or publishing it) to the deadline for filing a patent application. If you are the first to file, or if you can show you worked pretty continually on the idea from a time when you would have been first, then you can still get your patent allowed.
My TLDR version:
Patents are only useful if you are a big company with a legal department. Success rate for the lone inventor is virtually zero, with expected return hugely negative. The best thing to do is become THE expert on your idea, and then put it in the public domain so that nobody else can patent it and sue you.* Keep improving your idea faster than anyone can copy you.
*(they may do so anyway, but you will probably prevail)
But you end your post with “then you can still get your patent allowed” as if it’s a pretty simple and straight forward thing from that point on. A fuller explanation would be that you’re then free to spend tens of thousands of dollars and years and years in order to obtain a patent. It’s so far from what people imagine the process being like that it’s really important to clarify that detail.
Moreover, having an issued patent provides virtually no protection in the sense most people expect. After blowing, say $30,000 on your patentable idea and 5 or 6 years go by, you now have the right to sue people in court when your patent is infringed. You buy the right to spend years and tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in litigation.
And that only covers the U.S.
So it’s technically true that you can obtain a priority date and talk to people about licensing your patent, but it’s such an inconsequential part of what’s required that it’s misleading to post about it without mentioning everything else.
It’s like if someone asked how to get a college degree from a top university and you said you’re allowed to apply for a wavier on the application and get your application considered without paying the $50. Yeah that’s technically true, but the $200,000 in tuition and 4 years of hard work is really the relevant part of the story.
I meant to answer the OP’s central problem, namely, “So what do clever people with clever ideas do to make money off them? They can’t present the idea for sale without essentially giving it away.”
Patenting something by oneself isn’t the only option. An inventor can sell their idea to somebody who funds the patenting process (and ends up as assignee).
You actually mentioned licensing the patent, not assigning the intellectual property to a buyer. And more to the point, I disagree that either of your methods are realistic options for a clever person to make money off his clever idea.
I haven’t seen Working Girl, but if Amazon could get a patent on “one-click ordering” then I think the floodgates are open, as far as business strategies go.
Although an utter layman, I have read extensively on patents back when the software patent issue was a big controversy, and I recall a reputable source making the claim that a million dollar idea isn’t worth patenting, because you need 12 million in sales just to break even on the patent process and defending your patent after you get it.
Bottom line, it’s only good for 20 years. If you aren’t going to make at least a million a year in sales during that time, you’ll probably make more money on it just releasing it into public domain and being first to market.
You can’t make money off of those ideas. The guy who was first has already protected it. You would be infringing his IP. Your only hope is that he can’t afford to sue you over your infringement.
Working Girl is a mergers and acquisitions scenario. The protagonist is officially just a secretary, but pretends to have her boss’s title and puts together a deal for a seemingly unlikely buyer so that they can get the maximum sale price. The protagonist’s boss claims credit for the idea and fires her for representing herself falsely.
It’s not a good scenario for the OP to bring up, since there’s no intellectual property involved and we’d expect an employer to own a employee’s ideas anyway.