You do not have to register it. The law can say that SW copyright will hold only if the binaries come with source or some way to get the source, much the same like GPL requires the source to be offered.

I had such ideas long time ago - for software and for art. Limited terms may work quite well for patents too.

So the article is misleading. But can we extract some use of it?

I am not working in this area, but this is what I understand: We have CO2. We want to convert it to H2-C-H2 groups and bigger molecules + O. This requires energy, sure. Maybe in form of high temperature... So we need heat.

Here is my suggestion: there are large amounts of unused heat in power plants - both conventional and nuclear. This is why you see all these tubes and white smoke near them. Power plants transform chemical (nuclear) energy to thermal and then to electrical. It is a natural (physics) property of transformation heat -> electricity that it has low efficiency. Look at your thermodynamics books why. So not all thermal energy is converted into electricity in the power plants. Large parts of it (50%) are radiated in the air or used for heating of houses near the power plants IF there are living areas near the power plant. But in many cases there are no such consumers near by. Here is where the new process may be used - put such devices in the existing power plants and use as much as possible of this now unused thermal energy.

The result: power plants will produce same amount of electrical energy, but also O2 and hydro-carbonic substances, which may be used as fuel. And will use CO2 for this. If this is done efficiently, this can be a very big contribution to CO2 emission reduction in the power plants.

Just my thoughts ...