Is it safe to talk about ideas that I have not patented yet over public email? I have an idea with which I may someday make a startup. I can talk about it with experienced people, over public emails for example. However, I wonder if from patent point of view this is safe. My concern is from two separate perspectives: Publication, for example, can prevent a later patent if I understand correctly. However, this is over, for example, Gmail, and would not go into much details about it. Since I am at the moment employed by a company, even though the idea originates from myself, it seems that I should quit my job first in order not to have my current company have any claim over my idea. I wonder if later one says, &quot;looking at your email, you seem to had this idea when you were employed by X company, so even if you filed a patent after leaving this company, X can still have claims on your idea.&quot;
With respect to the first question, discussing an idea in a non-encrypted email is not a publication that forfeits the right to patent an idea, even though it is not 100% secure. In the same way, talking about an idea for a patent with your patent lawyer in a secluded booth of a coffee shop in person does not constitute publication of the idea for this purpose, even if someone is secretly spying on you at the time. Since I am at the moment employed by a company, even though the idea originates from myself, it seems that I should quit my job first not to have my current company have any claim over my idea. It is possible that the contract makes even ideas that you come up with yourself while employed by the company the property of the company. If so, you are legally in the wrong and the idea belongs to the company. But, proving the reality that you are stealing the idea from the company is harder if there is nothing in writing. An email discussing an idea while you are employed would have to be disclosed in litigation with your employer over whether the patent applied for belongs to you or to your employer under an employment agreement. If you didn't put it in an email, it wouldn't exist to turn over in litigation.
In your example is the spare part the subject of a design patent? I assume it is not. When you combine the spare part to create a “different product” does the finished product resemble the drawings in the design patent? If, in its intended use, the final thing is close enough to the design patent to fall within its scope then you might by indirectly infringing by inducing people to infringe. The scope of a design patent is very difficult to determine reliably. This has nothing to do with how you got the components of your product, just how the completed thing looks. Copyright does not cover products (unless it is a model of a building or a statue or mold for a statue).
While not categorically illegal, there is a risk that using a trademark in an email name is something that is being done with a purpose to defraud people into thinking that you are affiliated with that company (and indeed, such emails are frequently used for that purpose as are misleading domain names). So, while it isn't outright forbidden, it is generally unwise.
If you use the reviewer's code, or code derived from it (e.g. if you just changed a variable name) then they own the copyright on that part of the software. If the reviewer describes a solution which you implement, or if you re-implement the code from scratch while taking ideas and methods from the reviewer's code, then you own the copyright on that code. However if there are only a few ways to implement something in code then the code is not creative and hence cannot be copyrighted. For example the regular expression in the question you link to is (as far as I can tell) the only correct solution to the problem: any programmer addressing the problem will have come up with that RE. In this the position is akin to a database of phone numbers: while the collection may be copyright (depending on whether selection or arrangement required creativity), the fact that Alice Jones has the number 012345 is not copyrightable, and neither is the alphabetical arrangement of names. Where it gets messy is the boundary between the two. The requirement to detect 4 or more repeated digits in a credit card number could be implemented in a number of ways, but whether there are enough of these to qualify any particular solution as "creative" would be a matter of fact for a court to decide.
could this mean my employer owns the idea and anything I develop --since I would use the same technology for my idea that I do at work? No, unless by &quot;technology&quot; you mean the employer's materials or resources (see condition 3 of the clause). Your remark that &quot;this is completely and utterly unrelated to [employer's] business model&quot; survives items 1 and 2. Likewise, working on your idea outside hours survives the corresponding part of item 3. Would this also mean that any open-source software I develop outside of work automatically belongs to my employer? No, unless the software you develop is &quot;based on [your] knowledge [etc.] of (COMPANY)&quot;.
The constitutional basis for all US patents is Article I, Section 8, Clause 8, of the US Constitution, which grants Congress the power: To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries. See &quot;Intellectual Property Clause&quot; from Cornell's WEX Legal Information Institute. US Patent law requires an applicant to include with a patent application &quot;disclosures&quot;. As the page &quot;Patent Disclosure: Everything You Need to Know&quot; from UpCounsel states: [A] patent disclosure is a public claim of data about an invention. In general, it is any part of the patenting process in which data regarding an invention is disclosed. A good disclosure tells someone else how to create the product. [Emphasis added] The U.S. Constitution gives Congress the right to offer exclusive rights to people for their inventions for set periods of time. This is only if and when the inventor agrees to adequately disclose the invention in writing. [Emphasis added] A formal patent disclosure ... stipulates a set of claims regarding the invention, as well as other data that reveals the unique nature of the product. It should be expressed in writing with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) as part of the patent application. What Is Included in a Patent Disclosure? The Specification. A primary disclosure or &quot;specification&quot; is a main document in a patent application. It describes the ways in which the invention is innovative compared to similar inventions and explains the scope of monopoly the applicant believes he or she has to the invention. The specification describes the item and the way to make and to use it, in clear and exact terms. Someone in the field must be able to reasonably create it with these instructions. Further, the specification notes the patent application filing date on which inventor can the rely. It also offers evidence that the invention belongs to the person in question. The Enablement. This explains how to create the object and how someone in the field can do so. The instructions cannot be vague or unclear, but must be exact and detailed. When the patent expires, the enablement should still be usable. This section should include any figures or drawings, with explanations. Again, you will want to show how your invention is special. So, you might want to include many details and different variations of the invention. Later, many of these variations may be deleted from the document as unnecessary. This section may be numerous pages long. Best Mode Requirement. The path revealed must be the best way of creating the item within the author's awareness at the time of filing. Therefore, it may include specific or unique techniques. There should be no concealment. A poor-quality disclosure can risk the appearance of concealment. [Italics added] Claims. This area tells the reader the exclusive rights the patent offers to the inventor.... The official page &quot;Duty of Disclosure, Candor, and Good Faith&quot; from the USPTO cites 37 CFR 1.56 on the duty to disclose information material to patentability. This regulation provides, in the relevant part: A patent by its very nature is affected with a public interest. The public interest is best served, and the most effective patent examination occurs when, at the time an application is being examined, the Office is aware of and evaluates the teachings of all information material to patentability. Each individual associated with the filing and prosecution of a patent application has a duty of candor and good faith in dealing with the Office, which includes a duty to disclose to the Office all information known to that individual to be material to patentability as defined in this section. The duty to disclose information exists with respect to each pending claim ... These disclosures include the state of prior art, as kown to the applicant and the applicant's associates. The page &quot;BEST MODE: Noncompliance with the Duty of Disclosure is Not an Option&quot; states: When you apply for a patent in the United States, you have a legal duty to disclose prior art that could be used to reject your application — in essence, information that may be used against you by the examiner of your application. While persons accused of a crime have a right to remain silent, so as to avoid self-incrimination, inventors applying for a patent have no such right. To the contrary, an inventor’s failure to comply with the duty of disclosure risks any resulting patent being unenforceable. The page &quot;THE PATENT BARGAIN AND THE CURSE OF RETROACTIVITY&quot; states: One of the requirements for the USPTO to issue a patent is that the applicant’s claimed invention be fully disclosed in the application and published in the patent. This is sometimes referred to as the “patent bargain.” This is at the opposite end of the spectrum from trade secrets law, under which a company can sue for © misappropriation of a trade secret but only if it takes reasonable measures to maintain confidentiality of the trade secret. ... Under patent law an inventor must fully disclose his or her invention before enforceable patent rights come into being. This disclosure requirement is sometimes termed the “patent bargain,” under which an inventor gains the right to exclude others from practicing a patented invention in exchange for disclosing the invention so that it may be known by the public and indeed practiced after the patent term has expired. ... [Emphasis added] In general a patent application is not just a description of a specific industrial process. It includes the research by which that process was discovered or developed. That research can benefit others in the same field, and so &quot;promote the progress of science and the useful arts&quot; in helping others to do further research and make further discoveries, which can often be done without infringing the patent itself. Of course, once patent protection expires, anyone may use the patent, and the final patent documents are supposed to include sufficient information that &quot;one skilled in the art&quot; will be able to build the invention or use the process that had been patented. This is in contrast to the situation which would exist had the inventor retained the discovery as a trade secret. In that case no one would have been able to use the patented discovery until some other person independently discovered and disclosed it.
One big hole in any scheme that relies on copyright is that it could not preclude people talking about the previous content or talking about you. This is well established First Amendment law. For example, see Near v. Minnesota 283 U.S. 697 (1931), which holds that except in rare judicially established exceptions (relating to military information, obscenity, and inciting acts of violence), government censorship is unconstitutional. Thus, no statutory scheme could be used to prevent third parties who happened to have seen the material while it was freely available from re-iterating what they had seen, or talking about it, or talking about the author (you). People could even reproduce portions of the published content. Some types of reproduction would be protected as fair use in the US, especially if the reproduction is for the purpose of criticism. (17 USC 107, and this previous Law.SE answer) The closest approach would be to protect your work as trade secret, making sure that anyone that you share it with agrees to non-disclosure. But, if you "publish unique content under this pseudonym" there is no way to "arbitrarily or wholly revoke discussion about that content". If the cat gets out of the bag, while you may have remedies against the person who violated the non-disclosure agreement, you would not be able to prevent third-party discussion or reproduction.
No. You are correct in that this is not related to Copyright. Copyright is meant to protect expressions of an idea. An URL is simply an address, like a street address. Can you legally stop people referring to your home address? No. Can you legally stop people from passing by and looking at your house on the street? Also no. A famous case related to hyperlink is Ticketmaster v Tickets.com (2000). Tickets.com used information Ticketmaster's website and deep-linked to there. The ruling established that: use of information is not infringing hyperlinking cannot be copyright infringement because no copying is involved. deep linking is not unfair competition If you feel that it is necessary to avoid people linking to specific pages of your site, you may consider accomplishing this technically. UPDATE It does not matter whether your site is meant to be public or not. For example, an knowledge base meant to be shared internally in an organization, but accessible on the internet since staff are geographically distributed. Again, you may think of it like a street address. A private corporate building meant for employees only. An address, like Room C, 16/F, Example Corporate Complex, 4321 Lucky Avenue can be shared like any other address. You cannot demand people to never refer to your office address. You can, however, setup a security post at the entrance and only allow certain guests to visit you. In the case of a website, you may state in your terms that one cannot share access information to any external parties. This will include the sharing of any authentication data (e.g. password) which can be used to access content.