Patent Question for a Social Network Site?

[Jon T]

Background:
I am a recent business graduate with an idea for what I believe could be a good social networking site. I have a team of friends that are helping me come up with ideas and we have a good amount of detail, but no actual programming has taken place yet. Of my team only one is a confident computer science major with good website making experience. We need to recruit computer science majors outside of our group of friends and will eventually deal with other outsiders. We want to protect our idea from these outsiders.

Questions:
1) Since we are still early on in the process, is getting a patent a good and reasonable option, given the fact that we havnt started programming?
2) If getting a patent is a good option, do you have any recommendations on how to do this as cheap as possible; we are college students with little money.
3) Any recommendations to protect ourselves other than getting a patent?
4) Any other bits of advice?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

[bcnu]

Patents are for new and non-obvious inventions. Do you have any of those?

Copyright of your software will be automatic, once it's written down somewhere. The bigger issue is frequently the jointly owned works as default from jointly supplied creative works of authorship. In theory, anyone who contributes anything to the code owns the entire copyright (as a joint owner) unless there is clear documentation (contracts) to the contrary.

For instance, you could form an LLC and hand out "member shares" under a shareholder agreement and then have all members, employees and independent contractors sign short and clear transfer of all rights in the copyright to the LLC in exchange for the LLC's agreement to package, market and distribute it and give the contributors AGREED royalties in proportion to their contributions...

Also strongly consider non-disclosure agreements with anyone in the group or outsiders who have access to the "plans" or other trade secrets.