Originally Posted by Bontrager
Someone told me you could send a certified mail to yourself that has your ideas/drawings/whatever in it. This way if someone steals your idea, you can prove that it was yours. He called it the "poor man's patent".
Yeah, my mom told me that trick for protecting artworks/manuscripts/etc, but if I remember right I read somewhere that it almost never holds up in a court of law. You can't really prove that the other company didn't come up with the idea independently. If you have the real patent, then it's infrigement...