True...and think about it.
It's pretty hard to get a patent(in the US at least), you have to get a lawyer to go through all the papers on getting a patent and i believe that in total its about $1,500 total for a patent.
Then you have to provide techincal diagrams of it, and a paper on how it would be used and so on and so forth.
So you might have some time to get the patent before another person does, unless they have a good amount of funding for it.