Is it possible to patent an idea and a process

Stupid question, perhaps.

[mack]

I have been searching for a definative answer and can't seam to find one, perhaps there isn't one.

I have had an idea in my head for a fairly long time, but it is unrealistic that I could ever delelop it. I know what it is, how it would work and the processes involved. But do not have the finances to actualy do anything with this idea.

Any ideas :)

Mack.

[jbinbpt]

The thing that I thought of when I read this was the lawsuit involving Amazon and the one-click technology. [internetnews.com]

I believe that a "business method" was granted the patent, without any actual technology in place.

jb

[mack]

I will be following that with some interest the idea I have is more for a service/product, but it appears to be fairly unique. The amazon scinario has me wondering though.

Mack.

[onedumbear]

I found this info helpful, maybe you will to. Check out The U.S. Patent and Trademark [uspto.gov]

[mack]

Thanks onedumbear

Mack.

[Duckula]

Hi mack. I see you've figured too that making a flying car is the get rich scheme of tomorrow :)

I don't believe too much on patenting of ideas. The legendary Neil Gaiman has put very clear my own point on one wonderful essay [neilgaiman.com]:

<snip>

Now, to make this problem an ironic meta-problem: what if I had patented the idea of "the ideas are not the hard bit" when I figured it first? I'd look very funny in court against Mr. Gaiman.

[edited by: lawman at 1:28 pm (utc) on Sep. 21, 2003]
[edit reason] TOS 9 [/edit]

[ShawnR]

• You cannot patent an idea
  
• You can patent a process, even if it has not been realised. (But it must be specified in a form detailed enough so that it is not just an idea, but actually shows the inventive step.)
  

>>>"...searching for a definative answer ..."

There will always be gray areas, and precident that can be interpreted one way or another. In particular, if there is no novel inventive step, but you consider the end product novel (i.e. the idea is novel, but not the technology to realise it) then I don't think it is patentable, but a lawyer might be able to find a way... ;)

[John_Caius]

...but you can publish an idea and this at least sets it as your intellectual property so that other people can't attribute it to themselves in the future.

Remember that brief but oh-so-significant sentence from Crick and Watson's paper on the structure of DNA:

It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.

The knowledge they were publishing was a structure derived from x-ray crystallographic data but the idea they were publishing was that this structure was compatible with inheritance of genes. The knowledge about the actual mechanism of DNA replication and inheritance came later but the initial idea as to the mechanism was attributed to Crick and Watson through this single statement.

[biocrs.biomed.brown.edu...]

[mack]

To an extent it relies on existing tech to provide a new service. The service is unique.

You could almost say that the process used to deliver the service is part of the service, my idea is the process :)

Sorry for being so vauge

Mack.