High costs keeping software startups from filing patents | Hacker News Reader

High costs keeping software startups from filing patents

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17 pointscoderdude14 comments

Forget about the up-front cost of filing a patent, and consider the cost of enforcing one. Your patent isn't going to issue for five to seven years after you file it. You'll already have succeeded or failed by then. And once it issues, then what? Figure years and years of costly litigation to enforce your patent. Once.

Patents are not a meaningful part of the arsenal for small tech startups. Watch out. Unscrupulous IP lawyers will try to convince you otherwise.

I think about patents as options on lawsuits. A 20-50k patent gives you the option of a ~1-5 million dollar lawsuit(s).

As you noted there are also concerns about time. It takes years to get the option and then years to exercise it.

This is really really good news :D

Are patents old hat to software startups?

Uh, they were always old hat. No one has ever liked them except for larger companies that can use them to mess up the competition.

This isn't good news at all. Nothing about it implies that when large incumbents imitate (or simply notice) something invented at a startup they won't patent it.

This is a disadvantage for startups, because big companies will play this game. And it's a game backed by IP law so you can decide not to file, but you can't opt out.

Even larger companies only get them so they don't get caught out of position in the patent war. You need patents in your arsenal (mutually assured destruction).

For what its worth, my lawyer charges $2000, $5000 for a full, and $3000 to convert a provisional to a full. Not the kind of money I would find in my couch cushions, but not 30k either.

He's a good guy. I worked with him when he was at Greenberg Traurig and I was at Yahoo.

He is now captain of his own ship without biglaw overhead.

For a startup that can afford it, patents and IP in general can be a good investment.

Think of how much money we would save if we abolish the whole patent system, at least the software patent part.

$30,000? Isn't the filing fee around a few hundred dollars . I guess they have some big lawyer fees.

http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/qs/ope/fee2009september1...

I have spent an hour on the phone almost everyday for a few weeks talking to our patent lawyer, then there are all the extra hours of searches they bill me for.

This is for a complex piece of opto-electronics, explaining to the lawyer (who has a physics degree) exactly why this is different to the dozens of similar patents is expensive - but a different bit of wording now can be important when I'm being sued by IBM or Sony in a few years.

Your lawyer might want to look at a training "video" I put together. It's a PDF of a series of PowerPoint slides with few words and lots of pictures. It's designed to be skimmed rapidly by a reader, and/or to accompany a classroom-type discussion.

The PDF explains how an inventor and lawyer can use something like extreme programming (XP) techniques to complete most of the work of drafting and reviewing a patent application in one sitting.

http://www.ontechnologylaw.com/docs/ToedtOneAndDoneInventorI...

The folklore is that just being able to say "patent pending" is worth something to a startup. (I'm not aware of any empirical testing or validation of that view.)

The $20-30k is likely an average, spread over many years, and also skewed towards particularly expensive patents. As others note, provisionals and the early costs of filing can be relatively inexpensive.

Clearly, in the software space patents are nice but not needed. However, they are the coin of the realm for biotech, clean tech, materials, and many other fields. There's some other papers by faculty at Berkeley (Ted Sichelman) showing that, in many fields, patents are one of the more prominent drivers of series A valuations.

Great - now we just need to raise the price so _nobody_ can afford to file a patent (on software at least).

How does a trillion dollars sound?

Is there a list of good, reasonably priced patent lawyers who specialize in software/web patent applications anywhere on the web?

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