Comment by mjn

I suppose you can make some effort to get credit for them, but in a lot of areas trying to own and monetize everything can significantly distract from actually making progress. You end up spending all your time worrying about trade secrets and licensing and patents, and less of it worrying about science or engineering. It's actually a common failure case ("failure" from the scientific POV, at least) for inventors who come up with genuinely good stuff and then end up sidetracked for years with all their energy focused on ownership and licensing disputes.