Reply To: Boron availability

[Maya]

vansig wrote: i was once asked for some help, by a person who believed his ideas were great, and wanted to share — but please sign the NDA; which i did. and that’s when the trouble started. because perhaps my questions lead to exposing flaws, and my suggestions for fixing them were regarded by the other as ostensibly trivial, and obvious, and not departing from the original intent of the inventor, only a source of greater costs.
i ended up writing large parts of the patent application, without which the thing just would not work; and i was not paid for my input, nor did i receive my name on the final draft.

in my opinion, fraud had occurred, and i am the victim. it was a powerful introduction to the paranoid world of the proprietary, and an important lesson to me, not to allow myself to be trolled by such things.

this forum is for free and open discussion.

if you really want something to exist in the world, lose the need to own it.

Sorry, I couldn’t tell who the user was at first. The system we have is not ideal. But for the same reasons that you are concerned about fraud, I see no other way to do this fairly. If you and your family put hundreds and hundreds of hours of work into an original idea that no one in ivory towers could figure out in decades it is only fair to ask for credit for the invention and fair compensation for your work if someone else is going to make billions off of it. I have no illusions. If the idea worked I would get nothing but crumbs even with patents. But I still deserve compensation for an honest day’s work, especially when so much profit is being made.

As for the NDA, I’m sorry you got burned. You should have gotten credit. What people in academia (who are generally opposed to patents and NDAs) don’t bother to consider is the fact that they are being paid for their work so compensation isn’t an issue for them. I was hoping the forum was also about promoting fusion energy and if it is, people like myself need some way to get a fair shake and share the ideas. So, in that regard as well our system is broken because it is discouraging people like me from ever sharing it. We need a national registration scheme so that ideas can be put out right away and afford protection without all these legal costs and games. So, it isn’t necessarily about “owning” the idea, just a fair way to share ideas.

That’s why I asked for help. Once I have a patent I have no issue with publishing it in the open and I intend to. In fact, I would be crazy not to.

I’m also sorry that people think that because someone simply disagrees with them they are “trolling” or “trolling” for an NDA. How else does one ask for help? How else does one test their ideas in the acid bath of objection and discussion? All this is doing is discouraging advances in fusion. Put yourself in the shoes of someone who has very good reason to believe the ideas they are trying to share are actually sound and significant. What would you do? Do the very same thing you just lamented and ensure non-credit and non-compensation for yourself? Of course not. So an inventor is forced to take an extreme position: act greedy or lose it all, imo.

btw, suggestion. If you do an NDA and end up helping with the innovation …. STOP. And demand a renegotiation. An honest player should be willing to share credit with you.