Protecting ideas from being patented

from the stop-the-"Enclosure"-of-thought dept.
Foresight is looking at the question of how to make it easier to protect one's inventions from being patented. Such ideas must be publicly disclosed; see IP.com for one approach. Senior Associate (and computer security expert) Norm Hardy reports: "I wrote this note about two years ago. It is about just the subject that you raise. It is also an example of ideas that we wish to protect. Most of our ideas relate to software; however, I see no reason that protecting programming ideas and nanotech ideas differ in this regard. In addition to the ideas presented it seems feasible to pay AltaVista or Google to index the site or sites with the ideas. Google can even qualify searches by URL."