Patents, creative commons and ROI

[garymo]

Dear all,
ROI= return on investment

Have been quiet for a while as my son was badly injured last year, my machine is cutting now but still unpainted.
I have been working on a project (musical instrument stand) as well as my machine for some time and have been looking to get a patent for the project.

What i have learnt is :
-Patents are expensive (thousands of dollars) as are trade marks.
-Patents generally are for big corporations.
-Patents take a lot of time and money.

This revelation has led me to investigate creative commons licenses and items like the Arduino and Mechmate. And i guess the thing for me is that i wanted to be designing things rather than wasting my time on things like patents, this would also alow me to give back to communities like (Mechmate).

My model for this would be to provide a basic pdf that could be traced for free and provide a cad base for a cost all for non commercial use and grant a negotiated license to individuals to use on a commercial basis. I would also sell completed stands myself as per Arduino.

The basis for this model is something i have always thought would be the best way to run a maker business like a world wide localized and dispersed ikea that could benefit all makers and avoid using funds (mine and others) materials (bought and produced locally where applicable) & resources (transport double handling ect) unnecessarily.

Any ideas comments appreciated.

[MetalHead]

What are you talking about for this patent?

[garymo]

A patent for a musical instrument stand

[Jan de Ruyter]

Not part of this forum, but a patent is an EXPENSIVE thing. It is better to design something, have an early market penetration, make your money with the first thousand or so and then do something else before the others have caught up. You also have a limited market for something like this, you are not going to sell thousands, so it is better to have a whole arsenal of designs.

The key is: provide a superb customer dervice and a quality product, that is your BEST patent.

[garymo]

Thanks Jan,
I think you are right re the patent, but from the figures, 1,648,595 guitars were sold in 2000 from http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/127437.html and people who have guitars usually have more than 1.
I guess my reasoning for bringing all of this up is that it would be great if all of the talented people who build something like a mechmate could tap into creating things for others be it furniture, accessories, houses, ect without going through websites like quirky.
It gives the craftsman something to create outside of the world of faceless company's. we already have some of the tools we need to mass produce quality items.
As far as i understand the creative commons licenses would allow people to produce there own useful items for free as we did with the mechmate in the past (development phase?) and allow the owner of the work to generate a return.
I could be wrong but looking back through the posts i think some people don't proceed with a mechmate because they cant see how to make it pay for itself.

[Gerald D]

The value of a patent to a small guy is that he would have something that he can negotiate with when talking to big guys. If you don't intend ever to talk to a big guy, a patent is not of much value.

Why would a big guy talk to a small guy about a patent . . . . .only if there is a second big guy that he wants to compete with.