Protecting your idea

As a technologist with a hot idea for the “next great thing,” you are rightly concerned about protecting your intellectual property when placing your concepts on the Internet. As technologists ourselves, we’re strongly sensitive to this concern and have taken a number of steps to address it.

You may have noticed that during Sign-up, all members agree to the specially crafted non-disclosure language of our Terms & Conditions statement. The non-disclosure language makes sure all our members are aware of the sensitive nature of the project profile information posted on FundaGeek by project owners. We went a step further by having two classifications of projects: Public – projects that can be viewed by all members and all non-registered users who come to FundaGeek. These projects, since everyone can see them, will have the best visibility to potential backers. The other class of project is Private (private is not used here in the strictest security industry definition). Private projects can only be seen by registered members who’ve agreed to our Terms & Conditions and especially the non-disclosure language.

We recognize that the above provisions may not be enough to settle all of your qualms about posting your great ideas on FundaGeek. For that reason, we’ve consulted with a prominent intellectual property (IP) attorney and invited him to provide our project owners with a special IP guidelines document, Protection of Intellectual Property for Individuals and Small Entities", that addresses the four pillars of IP protection: patents, copyrights, trademarks and trade secrets. We feel that if you take one or more of the recommended steps outlined in the guidelines, you’ll be in a good position with respect to your intellectual property.