Then again you run the risk of someone else beating you to the patent. I love those stories about how the famous creator/inventor of [some idea or device] published the discovery an hour/day/week before someone else.
Well, you thought wrong. Patents were intended (and, for the longest time, worked quite well) as a trade between inventors and society: the inventor gets a legal 20 year monopoly on using his invention, and the rest of the world learns how exactly it works so that they can use it freely afterwards.
That's correct, but you run the risk of someone else patenting the idea first. So it's risky - but could pay off if you invent something far ahead of its time.
Since a patent lasts 17 years (give or take various exceptions), I think the point is that taking one out 17+ years in advance is sort of silly, specifically because of the time lag.
I'd suggest that it's still worthwhile just to make sure that someone else doesn't file it; it's better to have something like this publicly available so nobody can sue you, even without the monopoly, rather than run the risk of getting it patented by someone else and then have to litigate the prior art.
But if you have developed something truly ahead of the state-of-the-art, disclosing it gives your competitors a leg-up.
Another problem with patenting it is that it gets more expensive to maintain each year (there are increasing annual fees), so by the end, the total expense would be enormous; hard to justify if there is zero revenue coming in. [I'm going by Australian law here, assuming US is the same] Hmmm..... I wonder if this means that many patents "on the books" have actually expired for this reason, before the full 17/20 years?
