Comment by jkeat
6 years ago
Patent law includes a provision for situations like this - it’s called “derivation,” meaning basically that someone stole another person’s work and tried to patent it. The rightful inventor can initiate a proceeding at the patent office to invalidate the patent and get control of the work.
If you add enough bling to an existing idea, you can patent that, if the bling you add is an obvious and probably necessary path forward, you can still steel ideas from the public domain.