Ask HN: How does startup companies patent their general software technologies?
I was going through patents.google.com looking for patents to an idea that I would like to work on and to see if there already is one or not. However, it is very disheartening. Say for this particular example of a case.
I want to make a screencasting application in the web browser using the webRTC API. Now, without going through the patent, I could hack a product that does some business functions. Some of these implementation would be quite general, which I imagine, most developers would be able to implement on their own. However, these solutions would be quite similar (not on exact implementation detail, but rather on process). So as far I as got it, this patent https://patents.google.com/patent/US20140281896A1/en?q=webrtc&assignee=Google+Inc. claims such a process even specifying WebRTC.
Another case, would be if I want to use computer vision to detect faces from websites. But this patent seem to claim the idea of it : https://patents.google.com/patent/US9215411B2/en?q=webrtc&assignee=Google+Inc. Like for example 1. The method of claim 6, further comprising: detecting a face; and one or more of panning and zooming into the face.
It basically claims for detecting a face. If i implement such things using openCV, would that be patent liability?
How are such things handled in general? How can one pursue any innovation based on such restrictions? Or it doesn't matter in the sense they are not able to do?
tldr; For example, how can piwik do a analytics service when there are other patents that cover the process of implementing such service? How can you build a competitive product?