
Question for founders: Do you own your technology? - danielha

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staunch
Patents offer an illusion of protection -- their only real value is in
boosting one's valuation. I think most technical barriers are an illusion too.
It's ridiculously hard to create something new that actually works for users,
but it's almost always trivial to clone something that exists.

Sites with no competitive technical barriers:
YouTube/Flickr/MySpace/Digg/Reddit/Blogger/Slashdot/IMDB, etc.

Look how quickly video sites sprang up once YouTube showed us how to do it
well. And despite the flood of more technically advanced clones, no one is
making a dent in YouTube's traffic.

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danielha
It's one thing to have a novel idea. But do you have a competitive advantage
in the form of, say, a patent? Discuss!

