How To Survive a Patent Challenge?

An anonymous reader writes "I have written a nifty application that helps me run my own business, and could really help in running almost any business. It has been abstracted well enough that it could very plausibly be made a sale-able product. There are several very good, possibly patentable ideas within it. However, they are overshadowed by virtually an infinite number of possible bs challenges to its more mundane parts. I'm rather fearful of bringing this to market for that reason, and so far have only deployed it as a 'consulting' project with two other small companies (who love it). Does anyone have suggestions about how to proceed?" Other than a generic "hire a lawyer!", are there practical steps a software author can do here?

Comments

Yay for patents

[CopaceticOpus]

Isn't it great to see how software patents can encourage innovation? (And by encourage, I mean scare away.) What could be a better example of how broken the system has become?

unfortunately, not a lot of good answers

[Trepidity]

It sounds like you're confident that the core of the product is novel and not already patented. So the issue is accidentally stepping on a bunch of overly broad patents for stupid things? Unfortunately, the crux of the patent mess is precisely that: it stifles innovation because there is no good way to know you're not stepping on a bunch of stupid, overly broad patents, that will take a lot of money to litigate even if they turn out to be invalid.

Hire a lawyer

[Mr. Freeman]

"Other than a generic "hire a lawyer!", are there practical steps a software author can do here?"

HIRE A FUCKING LAWYER. Why on earth is it that people keep asking these questions when they know full well that no one here is a lawyer and half the posts are signed with "IANAL"? They have lawyers for a reason, that reason is to give you legal representation in matters involving the interpretation of the LAW. You need a lawyer, not a bunch of people on the interwebs claiming that "they've seen such and such a technique work", "long ago", and "once when my friend got sued by this one guy".

Are you really willing to risk your patents based on some advice you got off of the internet from someone whose name you don't know whose credentials you don't have and probably don't actually exist? If so, then by all means keep asking legal questions on a tech website. But your post makes it seem like you actually want credible legal advice, so stop asking slashdot and GO HIRE A LAWYER.

Re:Hire a lawyer

[RobinH]

Your post seems reasonable, but having just gone through incorporating and worrying about it myself, there's nothing wrong with asking non-lawyers about the experience. Most small software business owners who have looked into it would be good people to ask. Most of them *have* talked to lawyers and in my experience, everyone seems to be getting the same advice. There's also lots of people who post about these experiences online, and taking them in aggregate, there is useful info about there.

Something you have to keep in mind about lawyers: they make their money by selling you fear, just like insurance companies. If they had their way, they'd want you to spend all your startup capital on lawyers "just to be safe", but then you'd have no money or time left to actually develop your product. It's easy to get distracted by this stuff, but there are a lot more things that can go wrong in a software product launch than just a patent suit. In fact, from what I've read all over the place, it seems very unlikely.