Legal Question in Intellectual Property in California

1. Your idea is your property, and you can price it as you see fit irrespective of who the buyer is, but obviously at some price point the prospective buyer will simply say, "Too high!" and do without it, or work around whatever protection you have.

2. Protecting ideas, as such, is very difficult. Absolute secrecy works unless and until someone else comes up with the same or a very similar idea. A patent is recommended if the idea is for something -- a device or process -- that is patentable.

3. Ideas that are clearly not patentable, or probably not patentable, because of prior discovery or being obvious to someone knowledgable in the area, can sometimes nevertheless be protected sufficiently to bring them to market by carefully-negotiated and drafted contracts with the buyer/user. This is somewhat shaky and probably depends on the character and honesty of the buyer and other parties

4. You can approach the prospective purchaser and see if it would be interested in negotiating a non-disclosure, non-workaround agreement before looking at your idea. Many companies won't do this. One of the reasons is that they may be working on the same idea already, or something very similar.

5. I suggest getting a self-help law book written for inventors, covering the field of protecting your idea or invention. Check the Nolo Press catalog, for example, on line.