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You can protect your brilliant idea from theft by executing. Alternately, patent it and be a litigious SOB, but this requires a patentable idea and substantial money, typically.

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you can always patent it yourself with a fraction of the cost, nobody knows your invention better than you.

Unfortunately patenting something is very difficult to get right by yourself, learning to write patents properly is much like learning your first computer language without the benefit of a compiler or interpreter. There is a very strict syntax (for example any text in a claim after a dot is ignored) but no obvious way to break your patent into claims (think function declarations) wording is critical, as is segmentation into claims.

It is possible but it will consume a lot of time and effort be prepared. Luckily there are some good books on the subjects "Patent It Yourself" is worth a read as is "Patents, Copyrights & Trademarks for Dummies"

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