The very idea of not patenting an invention sounds hilarious to business minded people. But more and more inventors of website development and promotion software and solutions join the popular trend and DO NOT patent their inventions.

So if business people (owners of professional website development service or web site creation software or inventors of some social network solution) decide to risk for the only sake of NOT PATENTING their inventions, there must be something very serious about it.

Let's make a tiny flashback to the history of this non patenting movement.

Perhaps, the first company who started to exercise this approach was Google. The readers can instantly object saying that they saw hundreds of patents from Google. But deeper investigation will show that Google is patenting only independent approaches, possible interpretations, possible improvements of algorithm, interesting equations and many other things that NO ONE on the planet (but Google team, of course) can know for sure how this or that part of the puzzle influences the big Google algorithm (or algo - for short).

To put it into simple worlds Google is doing "puzzle patenting." Imagine that Google's search engine ranking algo consists of millions of puzzles. Google is patenting some of these puzzles and also the "new puzzles" that will or will not be included into the algo (no one can guarantee that this or that "puzzle" will have any value).

What is the advantage of this approach? - With this approach SE optimizers are very 'tough' in finding answers to these questions:

- How to fit all that puzzles together? - How to find out that this very "puzzle" that is patented is included into the big algo?

You can spend your whole life on testing and trying to find out the real truth about the algo.

And now imagine that Google patented its glorious algo. Then anybody can legally get this information - because it's in public access. This would trigger the creation of countless web site creation software, free website development tools, website development and promotion solutions - name it. And all they will be manipulating with the Google algo. That could be the end to the idea of search engine, because all would know how to manipulate its algo.

Should I Patent? What Should I Patent?

Everything depends upon the type of your product. For example, you are selling educational course about how to create website, unique useful tips, etc. After buying it people see the whole info and can duplicate it. For this type of products patenting is a must as it makes you feel safer and at least have legal grounds to slap vicious duplicators.

But if you are selling something that people use but cannot get inside the black box and see how exactly it is working - better do not patent. In this article I mentioned website development and promotion software, tools and solutions. But that can be any type of program or software which is a big piece of programming code. And with this type of products the story is different.

You are welcome to join the public discussion with tips about how to avoid patenting and still get product highly protected.