On Fri, 13 Jul 2001 09:10:04 -0700, you wrote:

>>I would like to hear what other PIClisters use to protect their =
designs.
>
>Though I wouldn't recommend it for the home hobbyist, we patent just =
about
>everything we can.

>A well written patent can protect you from somebody developing a =
functional
>equivalent.  That's something that concealing components can't do.
Patents are a waste of time unless you have the deep pockets to defend
them.=20
The flipside is that nowadays patents seem to be less about protecting
truly innovative work, and more about big companies patenting anything
they can get away with, however trivial -  often non-innovative things
that any  half-sensible engineer would have come up with given the
same brief. All this does is stifle competition and feed the lawyers.

On the subject of what you CAN do...
One useful, and very cheap & easy, thing you can do is add some
'hidden' functionality, which can be used to easily prove if someone
has done a direct copy of your code - this is covered by copyright and
should be much easier to take to court.
There are plenty of possibilities, which depend on what interfaces are
on the product - things like obscure button sequences to display a
message or squirt a serial data stream out of a pin.=20

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