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Your company invested heavily in developing abstract ideas and turning them into
a working product, a product that solves real life problems and makes people's
lives easier. You advanced the technology and the collective pool of human knowledge.
You deserve to be recognized for advancing the state of the art, technology, and
the human race. You also deserve to be compensated for your effort.
Most nations recognize that you deserve that recognition and compensation. They
provide different mechanisms to give you your dues, but they do not go out of
their way to do so. It is up to you to claim that protection. In the US, for example,
you can simply maintain the workings of your invention in secret and sell the
product for fun and profit. This method, known as a a 'trade secret', provides
you with protection only as long as your competitor does not know how to duplicate
your effort, without deriving that knowledge from you. In chemistry, it may be
a very significant deterrent to copying the invention. In software and most electronic
based inventions, this is not the case. The moment a professional sees a program
operate, he/she can analyze and determine almost everything that is needed to
create that program from scratch. The rest may be easily (if tediously) picked
up with a debugger. From then on, it is only a question of effort - writing and
debugging - before your invention is copied and you begin to lose your market
share, recognition, and the rest of your just reward. Even worse, since you concealed
your invention, under certain circumstances someone may patent it and demand royalties
from you or even drive you out of business!
Copyrights, another form of intellectual property protection popular with software
developers, protect the expression of an idea. In simple terms, it prevents someone
from copying your code verbatim. As every professional knows, there are limitless
ways to code and every programmer is likely to code a segment differently. This
difference is enough, in most cases, to end the protection offered you by copyrights.
In some cases, copyright protection was thought for screens generated by the program
and for specific icons. Even if successful, it is again a very limited form of
protection.
Increasingly, the software and high tech industries are discovering that the
best protection for their intellectual property lies in the tool designed for
innovations and inventions - patents.