You may be cool with open-sourcing your billion-dollar idea, but if you want investor capital, you're going to need a patent.
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Prove It
One of the US Patent and Trademark Office's requirements for patentability is that your invention is new, useful, and unobvious. Search the USPTO.gov database, trade journals, and any other relevant sources for "prior art" -- that's patent-speak for gizmos that already use your idea. Some similarity is OK, as long as your advances are big enough that "a person of ordinary skill in the art" wouldn't find them "obvious."
Read more: Wired
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