Hand-washing & hand-wringing Re: <fart>

[Gordon Mohr]

Stephen D. Williams writes:
> I actually have an invention that would revolutionize hand washing... 

Does it need revolutionizing? 

>  Unless and until I find someone willing to fund the patent process or 
> until I have the money to pour down the drain ( ;-) ), the world will 
> just have to continue suffering. 

Or, you could stop thinking of your idea as a source of proprietary
advantage, and simply give it as a gift to the world. Perhaps you'd 
get fame; perhaps you'd gain satisfaction at having performed a good 
deed that "revolutionizes" many lives.

It seems unlikely that the value of the idea will grow over time,
barring growth in the seriousness of hand-bourne diseases. Further, 
there is an increasing risk that the invention, if truly valuable,
will occur to someone else, causing its economic value for you to 
drop to zero.

Given that for now you have chosen to "make your living elsewhere", 
you seem to have assessed the risk-adjusted return (economic and 
psychic) of pursuing the hand-washing invention as being lower than 
the return of whatever else you're currently doing.

So keeping the idea "in your back pocket" is suboptimal both
for you and society. It is only through a dreamy, unrealistic
estimation of the idea's value -- an estimation largely disproven 
by your day-to-day preference of other income-generating activities --
that the nondisclosure course-of-action can seem sensible.

This same sort of dreamy misestimation is why people who should know
better buy lottery tickets. By neither disclosing nor pursuing your
invention, have you fashioned yourself a virtual lottery ticket?

I further suspect that your invention did not arise because you were 
specifically devoting effort to creating patentable new devices, but 
rather because you saw a need and, given your experience and way of 
thinking, you had an insight. 

That is, you would have conceived of the innovation even without 
the prospect of patent monopolization. However, that prospect has 
now led you to delay disclosure and commercialization, perhaps
indefinitely.

This would then seem to be a situation in which the patent system 
is having an effect exactly counter to its stated aims.

- Gordon