Yes, I understand that having written it into a public forum, and not patenting it, I did indeed give it away for anyone else to use. What probably happened was that someone was suing someone else for stealing that idea, and one of those somebodies did a REALLY extensive search and found my invention. Presumably it would have benefited the somebody who did the search to be able to say something like, "We didn't steal the idea from you, Jim Bell thought of it first..." Yes, in hindsight I should have taken the $5000 and run. Jim Bell On Friday, March 13, 2015 1:04 PM, Stephen D. Williams <sdw@lig.net> wrote: If you didn't patent it and you published it publicly, you effectively gave it away for anyone to use. It is also now prior art, so finding a link that proves it was published would be useful. And you have bragging rights to inventing it if you were first. So, the $5000 would have been a good deal since you didn't have any value to sell, since everyone already "owns" a license to use it. sdw On 3/13/15 11:21 AM, jim bell wrote: Approximately December 24, perhaps it was 1996, I published an idea on a USENET area (maybe it was SCI.CRYPT) that proposed an idea that clock oscillators used in computers could be frequency-modulated with a long-period pseudo-random (linear feedback shift register) value to smear the output of the signal (and everything that depends on it) over a range of frequencies. Curiously, in early 2007 (When I was at United States Penitentiary, Florence Colorado) I received a letter from a law firm offering me $5,000 for ownership of this idea. (They had apparently figured out who I was, and had traced me down at my then-current address.) I presumed that around that time, there was probably a lawsuit challenging a patent on this matter, and the law firm was doing 'due diligence' looking for ammunition. I counter-offered that if they pay me 1/3 of the value of this idea, I would settle for that. Never heard back from them. Jim Bell