Say I send a company an email like this:
Legally speaking, is that company free to manufacture a product which implements my XYZ function without compensating me in any way? Or do they have to get approval from me first? Assume I have done nothing to protect this idea (copyright, patent, etc.). I just thought of the idea and sent it in.
They only have to compensate you if you sue them, and win. They can always argue they already had that product in development.
And they often did have the product or something like it in development.
There are some companies (I think of Hewlett-Packard when they were known mainly for calculators and for the instrument group they spun off as Agilent) who would get a great many such suggestions and would include a form or statement in some of their manuals to facilitate you relinquishing the ideas properly. They would also hire some people who were very visible outside the company with their ideas - I think of William Kolb in this group.
But for many companies these suggestions are more a nuisance than a help. Getting one always threatens to cloud the issue of inventorship if the company is already working on it or on a related idea, and if the company had not thought of it and it really is useful, it may be hard to manage paying for it properly. Companies that develop technology usually invest lots of money in speculative things and accept that many of them don’t turn out. If a contributor’s idea goes nowhere, he may feel miffed - but if it turns into a hundred million dollar business, he may go back for some compensation, or for more than he originally got.
Also, when some idea makes its way to the desk of somebody Pretty Damn Important, he’ll want the idea checked out, and so some poor young techie will have to try to either make six-sided wheels work, or explain why he has a negative attitude.
What would be the basis for such a suit? An idea isn’t patentable, you have to have an actual design for the realization of the idea. Even if you sent them an actual design, if you hadn’t patented it first then you wouldn’t be able to prove rights to it. A copyright is automatically created on creation of a work for publication, but patents on inventions don’t work like that.
In my completely unprofessional opinion you have just given away your idea. However, I think we have some denizens who are experts at IP law so let’s see what they come up with.
Bingo.
I took a business class with a guy who said he called a large company with an advertising slogan he wanted to sell. The person he spoke with said, “If it’s good enough, we may buy it. What is it?”
He said pridefully: “With a name like Smuckers, it has to be good.”
The guy is still waiting for a call back.
A poem isn’t worth much by itself. Add a killer melody and, better yet, get a super-star to sing it, and then you have something. To protect yourself, get a copyright to prove your ownership and secure any monies due you.
An idea for a product isn’t usually worth much by itself either; but if you have worked out all the details about how much it will save/make the company; some marketing ideas and a great pitch about why the company can’t do without your product you might have a presentation they would look at. But they might take from the market. So you’d be wise to get a patient first.
Big companies have very large amounts of money, marketing people and manufacturing facilities; not mention an army of lawyers, so CYA.
Exactly. Though even if you have a patent, you still have to defend it by suing violators. The point is, there are no patent police that protect inventor’s rights.
**If you send your product idea to a company, can they take it as their own? **
Yes, is the short answer. So don’t do that. See a lawyer with experience helping small inventors first instead.
The story of Robert Kearns, who actually had a patent before showing his idea to large corporations, should be instructive.
You can’t copyright an idea.
You can trademark a name, and you can patent a specific design if you have one. But the idea itself isn’t protected.
So, anyone can make a “car”. Only BMW can call theirs “BMW” because the name is trademarked. Specific technology developed by BMW in their cars is patented although other companies have technology that does exactly the same thing with a different design.
Some companies, especially those involved in creative, innovative type work have express polices against submitting product ideas to them for the very reason that they don’t want someone to submit the same idea they already are secretly working on, and then later sue them for using the idea in a product without payment or credit. I know of one such policy because I used to work for Apple Computer. By submitting an idea to them you are expressly granting them full license and rights to the idea and any future use of it.
I’d be surprised if that sort of language would hold up if tested – you can’t unilaterally take something without some positive agreement on the part of the person you’re taking it from, and without a signed document, the disclaimer is worthless. For instance, by replying to this thread you agree to send me $100.
The better solution is to make sure the letters are never seen by the people who are actually developing new devices. A secretary would reply, and never show them to anyone. If you can’t prove the engineers saw your letter, you have no case.
That’s not an apt analogy. It’s more like saying that if you post a message to the SDMB, you’re granting the Chicago Reader an unrestricted license to make use of your posting as they see fit.
The initial reactions to this OP are correct. No one owns an idea. If you tell someone about it, they are free to use it. Apple took Xerox’s graphical user interface and used it. Microsoft took the Macintosh interface and made Windows. Happens all the time.
There are some exceptions:
Trade secret – Some states protect trade secrets, but there are strict limitations on what will be considered a trade secret. And one of them is that you don’t tell anyone about it.
Patent – Federal law may protect an idea that is novel, useful, and non-obvious. However, you had better obtain a patent (a long, expensive, and not guaranteed process) before you tell someone about it, or he or she is free to use it.
Now there are some things that might belong to you that people can’t use, but they are not ideas:
Creative works – protected by copyright law. But copyright law doesn’t protect ideas, it protects only expression, meaning your actual, original, creative implementation of that idea in a fixed medium. And someone else is also free to come up with the same damn thing, so long as he or she didn’t copy it from you (independent creation).
Trademarks – This protection depends on your use of words or symbols, as indicators of the source of goods or services. If you’re not offering goods or services under the mark, then you’ve got nothing.
There was a case recently of a 9 y/old girl who emailed Steve Jobs with some improvment for her iPod (I think it was part of a class letter-writing exercise).
Anyway, she received a v. snotty letter from Apple’s legal dept. saying exactly that… “don’t send us any unsolicited ideas”, which apparently made her cry.
Apple have now changed the way they respond to similar letters from children, but I imagine the sentiment will be the same (just without the legalese).
Frankly, I think the original question shows a very common ignorance of how business really works. It’s a very common misconception in our culture that ideas are important. The truth is that ideas are not valuable - they only have value after you invest valuable resources into them.
Since we’ve already brought up Apple, let’s look at the iPod as an idea. Does anyone really think that Sony and Microsoft - and thousands of others - hadn’t thought of digital music players before Apple? The iPod didn’t succeed because of the idea. It succeeded because Apple set up legal deals to sell digital music, because it paid top dollar for industrial design, because it invested in advertising, and because it took advantage of existing IP, personnel and a die-hard user base. If the idea had come about when Jobs was still tinkering in his garage, I can assure you it would not have been a good idea and no one would have wanted to steal it.
I think that you have up to a year, after publicly disclosing an invention, to get an application filed for a patent. I think this changed some time ago when the US changed several elements of patent law to be more like the rest of the world, like increasing the time of protection from 17 to 20 years.
Also, I take it that in this thread an “idea” is less developed than a “design”, but that doesn’t identify the line between them. Where is that line? Or, more relevant in this thread, what are borderline cases of things that cannot and can be patented because they are ideas and designs?
Note that you can patent something like “a rope having greater than X strength” if it doesn’t already exist and you teach at least one way of making it. You get to claim ropes stronger than X as the scope of your patent, not just those ropes made by your teachings.
It’s not always that cut and dried. The same idea could occur to multiple people independently, it happens all the time. And patent applications are not instant it sometimes might take an engineer a matter of some days just to write up the idea and submit it for patent after initially discussing it in abstract form with various audiences. Taking the iPod example above, lets say it was already developed, and already a big success. Now I think to myself, you know this is cool but I wish it could play videos too. So I write Steve Jobs and say ‘hi steve, this ipod is great but why not make one that plays video too?’ He just got out of a meeting with product management because hes working on a top secret next generation ipod that plays video. It was a fairly obvious idea that was bound to occur to many people independently, including steve jobs, who already had his marketing and development minions hard at work on it before seeing my mail. I will have no credible claim against Apple when they release a video ipod 3 months later. But, lets say you wrote Steve Jobs and said ‘hi steve, I have developed a new ultra-efficient compression technology that rivals any others on the market today. It will allow a standard 1gb ipod to hold over one billion hours of video! It is so new I don’t even have a patent on the idea yet, and I’m counting on you to do the right thing and cut me in if you use it in a product. The whole secret is to’ [insert specific engineer speak here describing in detail a revolutionary new compression algorithm that is currently not in use in any product]. As it happens an engineer at Apple had the same flash of inspiration 2 days earlier, and steve just got out of a product development meeting about patenting and implementing that engineers brilliant idea. Now there is a potential problem if 3 months later Apple releases fundamentally the same new compression technology that was described to them in detail in an unsolicited email, while 2 separate patent applications are under development. It would be enough to get a court date and cost lots of time for Apple’s lawyers and possibly even result in a settlement being offered to the unsolicited idea giver or even them winning the case and demanding royalties for use of the technology in any products. This, I think, is why they protect themselves with a public policy of refusing to consider any unsolicited ideas, ever. By insisting on submitting them anyway we grant full ownership to them if they wind up in use later. They wouldn’t have the policy in place if there was never a situation where they could be sued over an idea.
Although you’re right about investment, ideas are theoretically valuable. It’s just that few value them because a) there’s so many floating around and b) what’s hard isn’t, in fact, coming up with ideas, but figuring out which ones are good.
So by sending them your ideas you’re not really helping with point b), you’re not really needed because of point a), and you might even screw them over if they ever get a handle on a and b on their own.
Ok, please explain this one to me. What do they have to lose by getting suggestions for that? I really think they just don’t want to hear ppls’ bullshit.
Actually, someone did think of a digital audio player in 1979.