One way to prevent inventions from being patented is to publish them. In other words turn your inventions into prior art. This is often referred to as “Defensive Publishing”. Inventions that are published in print cannot be patented provided these ideas are publicly available. This site is intended for that purpose. There may be a lot of ideas that you will never want to commercialize but hope someone does just to improve every day life.
The downside of Defensive Publishing is that one can monitor Wikinvents and file patents that improve on the ideas presented here.
Wikinvents hopes people will join in the effort to openly improve inventions and not file patents on improvements for ideas presented here – that’s just slimy. At a certain critical mass there should be enough collaboration where the best ideas/method will quickly be disclosed (much quicker than a troll searching for something to improve upon).
If you are worried about it you can either wait until you’ve done enough research that you feel really comfortable in posting the invention.
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