Ask HN: How to avoid patent infringement/patent trolls?

2 points

4 years ago

I know, IANAL/get a lawyer but I'm a poor solo dev in the US trying to bootstrap, those overhead costs are just too much when talking to an IP attorney can go for $200+ an hour. It seems that all my peers never worry about patents but every time I'm on HN, I always read horror stories that leave me anxious. Most of the cases seem to have a good ending but they always seem to take years like that GNOME patent troll case.

What are the best practices to avoid patent infringement/being a target of a patent troll?

I been reading lots of NOLO law books, I got 10 books from the library right now about IP law, Patent, Copyright, how to do Legal Research and so on. I know there stuff like EFF https://www.eff.org to help. There's Google Patent or USPTO search to look for prior art and stuff from 20 years ago is expiring* (I know it's not that simple but just want to be brief).

But I just feel anxious about the whole thing, it really has made me stop coding/sharing code/building stuff. It's just so time consuming when the old me would just jump into a fresh project and just start building instead. I see my old friends from college blatantly copying UI designs when they don't realize most of them are under Design Patents and they're at risk. Maybe I'm being dramatic but it seems that patent trolls are on the rise against even small players, so many new software patents are being filed at a rate more than you can reasonable keep up with, and in the coming recession it might be even more profitable to be litigious against small time devs. It feels like a necessity to cover your bases while you can.

I know there's no way to be completely safe, but there must be a some approach to at least reduce the majority of your risk. To do things the right way. What should a dev do to reduce their risk? (Right now I'm reading into Single Member LLCs so that I could offset the risk to that in case of a lawsuit but I'm just learning stuff right now, everything is fuzzy and more complicated than I can try to describe in a few paragraphs).

"That reminds me to remark, in passing, that the very first official thing I did, in my administration-and it was on the first day of it, too-was to start a patent office; for I knew that a country without a patent office and good patent laws was just a crab, and couldn't travel any way but sideways or backways." —Mark Twain

It just feels like it'd be easier to just give up building software but it shouldn't feel like that, I thought the patent laws were to promote the drive to pursue innovation.