No one owns knowledge, it should be freely shared. It is the processes and software derived from this knowledge that are leveraged to create products which are bought and sold. You can not patent a process or an idea.

You can patent how you do this process, what you have created from this process or unique methods that allow you to use this idea. Once a process exists in the wild, and is used by the community, such as a design pattern, you can no longer claim your patent unless it was delivered to the public by means of corruption.

If you write code to allow you to authenticate through a unique security process, then some one figures out your method and decides they should write code to do the same thing. You have no claim to their code and you can not stop them from using their process.

This fits into a larger open source argument, that has been ongoing between colleagues.