cypherpunks says:
> No, that's terrible.

Now that I've read and thought more about it, I'm inclined to agree with you-- it's better to have works default to public domain, and if you want otherwise, it's simple enough to add a copyright notice at the bottom. Thanks for changing my mind!

But I would guess that your quoting one line of my post below, in order to respond, is fair use, regardless.

Which is great-- it's really nice that everything gets some protection automatically.

No, that's terrible. Everything written down doesn't deserver copyright protection. A USA pre-1976 non-Berne Convention system, where you have to expressily claim copyright, and explicitly register your copyright if you want to be able to collect damages, is a much more useful system. For instance, I just infringed your copyright by quoting part of your post. Under pre-1976 law, I wouldn't have, as you did not expressily claim copyright on your post.

Russell Draper says:
> There is one problem with this, if you can't prove the
> person stole it from you, you are out of luck. If you
> really want to protect your idea, you should patent/
> copyright it.

Good point, but the site is set up to do everything possible to help you prove it if someone steals an idea (if it's designated as Private). The main new thing is that all members effectively have access to the site's entire server logs, so they can determine exactly who saw what when. There's other stuff going on as well-- incentives, legal language, identity verification-- and it all works together to give a pretty good amount of protection for not much effort.

Patents certainly grant more protection, but they're also more time-consuming and expensive. Heavy-duty, million-dollar innovations that are patentable should be patented. Premises, Premises is intended for ideas that are more lightweight or less fleshed-out, or that don't correspond to inventions. You can't patent ideas, but you can certainly sell them and protect them legally as intellectual property.

As for copyright, anything is copyrighted once it's written down, so you get copyright protection for your expression of an idea (if not for the idea itself) by posting to *any* website, even one that doesn't have all the fancy tracking, archiving, and contracts. Which is great-- it's really nice that everything gets some protection automatically.

Great innovation on the "idea exchange" concept, perfect for those ideas that do not receive investment, but are believed to be useful. Patent and copyright protections are only as strong as the owner's ability to litigate. For me, I'd rather put ideas on PremisesPremises than just forget about them.
Note that this is an interesting model for sharing any intellectual property (screenplays, book proposals) as well as the next gen litter box.

Edited by author 06-01-2003 01:43 AM
There is one problem with this, if you can't prove the person stole it from you, you are out of luck. If you really want to protect your idea, you should patent/copyright it. By posting an idea, you receive some protection under federal law, but not much.

Read at the bottom of this page
Update: I have no idea but for some reason QuickTopic messes up that link in my browser when I click it, but if I type that URL it doesn't. Strange.