A quick thought here. It appears that Utah wanted to use the "cold fusion" announcement as a way to get funding from the government for research. This was a mistaken idea. I base this upon my understanding of how copyrights work. Disclosure: I've written and sold software. (Not commercially successful, though)
This "cold fusion" research does not fit that designation, but it is useful as an analogy. In the software industry, if you want to protect your work, you do not do "peer review". Peer review is better for something like a government sponsored effort. As such, peer review is to me the way to go in order to get government funding. However, if the interest is commercial, then the last thing you want to do is peer review.
Let's put it another way. Peer review is a collective process. The commercial pathway is not collective, it is individualistic. This is therefore, an improper procedure in order to exploit the discovery of "cold fusion" at that time. That is assuming, of course, that "cold fusion" is valid.
For Utah to press Fleischmann and Pons to go public with an announcement is bad strategy if the idea was to protect the financial interest in it. Instead, they should have gone dark if they wanted profits. That means, keep the research secret and fund it as best as they could on their own. If they couldn't do that, the only other way was to go the peer review route. But then they lose their commercial rights to it. (unless there is something I am missing here)
I think this part of the problem belongs to Utah. My understanding was that they pushed Fleischmann and Pons to go public. If they went the peer review route, which is what Fleischmann said that he wanted to do, then this entire mess could have been avoided. On the other hand, if they kept quiet about it, they may have been able to go public once they had it figured out well enough to exploit it commercially.
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