Construction idea and Copyright?

[SRMcGee]

Folks:

I've come a little late to the party and am a commercial/transactional lawyer, not a patent lawyer, but do negotiate license agreements on a fairly frequent basis. While I generally agree with AMV8's posts on this thread, I take some issue with

If you are trying to make money from your ideas and designs the best way is to sell the completed speaker or amplifier that you have produced without giving away any details of the internal design.

This is, I believe, the approach lately espoused by Nelson Pass, so AMV8 has support for this perspective. But I would note that it doesn't take much effort to remove the drivers from a speaker (or simply cut it open) and discern the "special" bracing. Absent a patent, this sort of design improvement or know-how is prone to being stolen. If someone has a design that is patentable, the money needed to obtain and enforce the patent and confidence that the design is valuable (i.e., other speaker manufacturers will want to license the design), then I believe that patenting the new idea may make sense. Otherwise, not so much.

Oh, and the lack of enforcement of foreign patents in China is another wrinkle.

A secondry problem is trying to stop others from producing "similar" items.
Don

True, which is where the value of a well-drafted patent application becomes especially important.

Regards,
Scott

 

[DF96]

You are not correcting anthing I said. All I said was "If you post your ideas to the general public then they are in the public domain and anyone can use them."

Sorry. I thought you were making a legal point. Others may think so too, so my clarification might help avoid confusion.

Publishing an idea may, in practice, enable others to use it but it does not enable them to do so legally. For that they need either specific permission (e.g. via a licence) or general permission (e.g. by the IP owner placing it in the public domain). A patent, of course, automatically publishes the idea while simultaneously claiming ownership of it.

 

[Simply Audio]

Is It Okay to Clone Electronics
You cant publish a copyright drawing ie schematic but you can build an electronic device from any you find on a public domain and even sell it according to the website above
under COPYRIGHT

 

[lgreen]

My 2 cents-
In most countries copyright will attach at the moment you fix the idea in a medium of expression- a drawing or a built speaker (no need to publish, 1 version written our built is all it takes). No need to even register it with the Library of congress unless you are ready to sue (in USA).

This is not going to help you much at all since copyright allows others to copy the idea but not the expression, meaning your idea for bracing can be freely copied but not your exact drawing or the exact cross bracing of the speaker.

So copyright is pretty useless for this application.

Patent is what you want if you think you have something new and useful.

 

[soundoutlad]

If you merely want to establish that an idea is yours you can email it to yourself and keep a record of it.