Consideration for my IP

Almost a year has past since I registered a PCT about my concept. The outcome looks like becoming as real as my cynical deliberations a year ago had predicted.

The thing about using the patent system to protect IP is that it does involve risk. The length of time within which one has to prove whether the risk will pay off is in many cases insufficient for that risk to be assessed. Additionally, a risk also involves a probability of failure, and those who may choose to back a risk take on the consequences of the failure as well as any consequences of success. Unfortunately, it appears, the investment necessary to register national phase patents in some jurisdictions (viz Europe - $20 thousand AU) is too costly for any potential investor to to carry - even if the risk an investor may carry is only the money they would lose if the concept failed.

So, although I have three national phase applications in progress (Australia, New Zealand and the United States), I have no European registration, and this considerably compromises my market position, and saps my motivation. I have told the university as much, and although I intend to commence my study in July, think I might see things go on in the marketplace that will help me neither complete the programme nor apply myself fully to it. This may be all for the fact that I couldn't get a European registration because I couldn't afford the cost and couldn't find anyone to back me who could.

Although my concept becomes prior art, software leviathans may muscle in to the innovative territory staked out by my concept, and provide a solution that uses my concept in their product without paying consideration to me, the person who came up with the concept. I might observe this and conclude that this must be competition. This must justify the malaise that results in the cynicism that pervades an inventor's intentions. This must be the type of social justice in the society all of us want, because the evidence suggests that this is the type of social justice we all have.

Those who have the money to pay for expensive national phase patents stand a better chance of claiming ownership of their ideas than those that cannot. I can stand as testament to the way current secular philosophy can crush the individual as innovator; very possibly to promote the individual as consumer. Its better to kill the fox in us so to feed the pig in us. We've made this route so much less expensive and safer for everyone.

I have a disability support pension, so on disability support I will stay to do my consumer duty until my life is complete. Lay your hands on me oh life. Tuck me in.