On 08/11/05 07:55 pm Steve Richardson tossed the following ingredients
into the ever-growing pot of cybersoup:

Has anyone ever tried to market an idea or invention? ... The big hook is,
there is a Co.
interested in it for 1mill and royalties, but first we need patents in
Europe. This poor guy should be warring a T-Shirt that say's "I should of
said no". But what would be a better way to try and Market or sell an
Idea?
Or do you just hope you don't get racket over the coals?

The problem with patents is that they cost an absolute fortune to get via
the usual channels (as your friend seems to have found out) and they offer
virtually no protection in the real world unless you have the money to go
after all the people who WILL use the idea without paying for licenses. The
way things are now, Acme Company will infringe on your patent and you'll
call your $250/hr lawyer to prepare the paperwork for an injunction. By the
time it's served, Acme has disappeared and the same people are calling
themselves Worldwide Widget Corporation so your lawyer gets another call,
and this goes on until you run out of money. Meanwhile your competitors are
raking it in -- it's a lot cheaper to dissolve a company and file papers to
start another one than it is to prosecute under the patent laws. Or maybe
your competitors are honest. All they have to do is modify some part of
your invention's "claims" section and they have a whole new thing in the
eyes of the USPTO. From what I can tell (I have a couple of patents myself)
patents are more trouble than they're worth, and any company big enough to
be interested in licensing an individual's personal patent will generally
have enough technically-savvy people to "improve" on the patent and get
around it without paying any money to the original inventor at all.

An uncle of mine (in UK) has a bunch of patents for mechanical devices.
I don't know how much it cost him to register them, but I don't think
he's ever made a penny out of them.

Perce