I am trying to figure out if spending Bitcoin to buy Safecoin is a good idea or not.  They say there is going to be a grand total of roughly 4.3 billion Safecoin.  Right now they are offering 17,000 of them for 1 Bitcoin. 

4,300,000,000/17,000 = 252,941

So for 1 Bitcoin out of 21 million Bitcoins you can have the equivalent of 1 Safecoin out of 252,941 Safecoins.  So what is a Safecoin?  Is it actually a partial ownership in the "company"?  The "company's" value will be the total value of all Safecoins?  So for 1 Bitcoin *$500 right now* I could own 1/250,000th of a company that could potentially be worth unfathomably more than that?  That sounds like a decent bet, I might take them up on it, but only if I am understanding it correctly.  Am I understanding it correctly?

I am also curious, how powerful are their patents?  With Bitcoin no patents are involved, so anybody can pretty much copy any/all of it, so a bajillion competitors could pop up and do the same thing, or even do it better, which is one of the inherent risks with Bitcoin.  Will the Maidsafe patents make it invulernable to this risk?  Even with the patents, could other people still copy it anyways?  How enforceable are the patents?

Anybody help me understand this?