Paul Spinrad sez, "This 'Peer-Enforced Marketplace for New Ideas' lets people share and sell any quickly-describable ideas they come up with, while also protecting them with a combined legal, technical, and social infrastructure that's described in the site's FAQ. This is an experiment I've been working on for a while now, and I'm thrilled to pieces that it's finally ready to show!"
How does it work?
Read the contracts. There are two kinds of ideas on this site, Public and Private. Anyone can read the Public ideas– they're just here because their authors want to put them out into the world. The Private ideas are accessible only to people signed in as members of the site, who may register free of charge, provided that they agree with all the contracts' terms. Members using the site can discuss any idea among themselves, and also see which other members have read the idea, and when. Furthermore, all members have a financial incentive to rat on any other member who has used and profited from idea taken from the site without its owners' consent, or who has leaked the idea directly or indirectly to someone who has done so.
The financial incentive is that any "bounty hunter" member who demonstrates a stolen idea's path from another member's reading it to its unauthorized use should split the proceeds of any resulting settlement with the idea's owner. Read the legal language here. The ideas posted on this site are inexpensive, and if you're interested in using one of them, you're better off if you come clean, pay for it out of petty cash, and give credit where credit is due, rather than having to watch your back and worry about all the bits of evidence you constantly leave as you browse through this site and communicate with others in violation of the contracts.
(Thanks, Paul!)
