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[indikit]

This is an amazingly helpful site.  It managed to answer about ten of my questions in five minutes of browsing!

So can anyone help me with some further details, please?

My product involves combining two existing products, with slight modifications to create a novel and useful product.

My quandry is how to protect myself once I release the product.  The product itself invites being copied purely because the modifications needed to combine two off-the-shelf elements, is relatively straightforward.  But the marketing tool they then create is so massively beneficial to the industry the product is being created for, I'm almost certain that other advertisers will want similar products.

So what's to stop them taking the two same elements, and just changing the modification.  Same product, same tool, but it just looks different.  Maybe takes a different power supply, has different sized drill holes.  Or even that the electronics inside are just varients of the off-the-shelf products needed to make it work.

Would that make my patent null-and-void?

Also, I want to start using the product by January of next year.  Is it possible to make a patent application for the product, and begin manufacturing them?  I'm not currently intending to sell them initially, but to hire them.

By the way, I'm also based in the UK.