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To reiterate uman's and my previous posts, IDEAS are protected by patent, not copyright or trademark. It's an expensive process. If you are being paid for your work by someone else, the rights to your idea are theirs unless it's totally divorced from anything they're associated with, EVEN IF YOU DO IT ON YOUR OWN TIME, unless you have previously made a contract precluding their ownership in it. When I got my patent in the mid-80s, they (the people I was contracting for) gave me $100 when they filed and $1000 when it was granted. The patent was mine, the rights were theirs. To be fair, just having the patent was worth at least $10,000 a year to me because, as a credential, it drove my market value up. Incidentally, the patent does not necessarily give you the right to do anything (it might be an illegal thing or process); it gives you the right to prevent others from doing anything with it.
The things I have told you were facts as of that time. If the patent laws have changed substantially, I'm unaware of it. I know the process sucks because a guy sued my company for infringing on his patent for passwords, which had been issued to him in 1984. His suit was tossed out, of course, because it was easy for us to prove that the password predated that time substantially. It still cost a bundle to get it sheetcanned.
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