You can patent it, but here comes the patent trolls.

Patent trolls are companies that generate hundrets of as vague as possible patents and then sue you if you try to patent something similar.

This has also beed done by companies like Apple.

You don’t really have a good recourse when you a fighting an army of lawyers.

Additionally depending on where you are patent that you file may be entirely ignored on the other side of the globe.

Chinese companies are infamous for doing that, but history shows that American companies also did this before their economic boom.

Other options are to use some kind of license. Very often this is used when we are talking about code.