Comment by programminggeek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by programminggeek | Hacker News Reader

programminggeek

All businesses have risk.

Even if you are an indie one man shop you are in fact a business and there are risks. Same thing goes for being a lawyer or accountant or contractor. If you screw up, it could cost you financially in a very big way, even if you didn't intend to do anything wrong.

Even successful businesses can crumble, even billion dollar businesses can get beat up by litigation to the point it isn't even worth continuing.

To say that the sky is falling for indie devs is a bit silly. There are plenty of places you can build, innovate, distribute, and succeed. Sure, the iTunes App Store thing is big today, or maybe Facebook, or maybe Steam, or maybe Wii's downloadable channel, it doesn't matter. Any one of those could be gone in a year or two.

Here's an example, there are people out there who make millions of dollars selling e-books and mediocre/overpriced software on Clickbank right now. Some of those people get sued I'm sure for their products. More people show up. You could take the same ebook and sell it on Kindle or Nook if you got shut down or you could sell your software on the Mac App Store or Chrome Web Store if CB went under.

There are so many platforms to distribute and build software and businesses on now, it really is hard to complain about the death of the indie developer because there are so many new companies getting started every day on all these different platforms that didn't exist even 5 years ago.

As a business owner you can't control all risk, but you certainly can and should plan around them.

If one channel gets shut down, move on to a different one or a different product.

Great devs and great companies aren't built on one hit one time wonders.

The problem is that a lawsuit easily can take out a small developer. Even if the lawsuit is completely frivolous. I can't afford tens of thousands of dollars for a lawsuit. If I get sued my company is probably done. It doesn't matter if the suit has merit or not.

I haven't gone through this or anything, so maybe an actual lawyer would be happy to speak up in this thread. But my simpleminded understanding is that your typical frivolous lawsuit goes like this, only less transparently:

TROLLCORP: "We're suing your company for ONE MILLION DOLLARS."

CEO (through a lawyer, of course): "Well, oops, we've only got ten thousand in the bank plus a couple of old Macbooks. After that we're just going to declare bankruptcy and you won't see a dime."

TROLLCORP: "Well, okay, frankly, we don't want to see you go bankrupt. Bankruptcy court is no fun at all. We don't need to pay for a tedious legal battle. We just want the money. How about you just give us the ten thousand plus 5% of all future revenue from your products?"

CEO: "If I spend the ten thousand on a lawyer, I can file some motions to delay your lawsuit. Then I can go bankrupt. You'll get nothing then. So, how about one thousand bucks and 0.5% of future revenue?"

TROLLCORP: "Two thousand and 2%."

CEO: "Done."

As with any parasitic transaction, the parasite has no rational interest in killing you. Dead companies don't pay. The danger, of course, is that they won't be reasonable and will accidentally push too hard, in their attempt to convince you to search under more sofa cushions for loose change that they can take. Or that they are, in fact, happy to kill your company because they think it will be an instructive demonstration for the other companies they sue. Or that they will gradually consume your time and suck your blood and your company will eventually die of exhaustion in 2% increments. But, you know, this is why it's good to be a small company. Having nothing means having nothing to lose.

The "can't squeeze blood from a stone" defence is probably your best bet if you're a really small operation, but as you say you'd just better hope the patent troll is behaving in a rational manner & not trying to make an example of you. I would assume that a rational troll would only harass you if you were getting noticed & making a profit, but who knows what kind of reasoning goes on within the lizard hind-brain of your standard patent troll types...

Nothing you say here seems to contradict the author's position that the patent situation is making things worse for indie devs.

But that situation is not anywhere near impossible. What's more, the patent system is there to serve a purpose, innovation, even (and especially) for the indie developers. Now, if that purpose is not served, which seems to be the case for software, it's time to lobby for governments to interfere, not to give up on independent entrepreneurship.

But keep in mind, the patent trolling industry can't take all the money, or there wouldn't be any more developers to sue. In this case, the parasite methaphor really is apt - if a parasite completely wipes out the host species, then the parasite goes extinct as well.

So yeah, the situation isn't impossible, because patent trolls need to keep the success rate high enough that new software entrepreneurs are tempted to try.

The trolls could easily wipe out all indie developers without any problems, because they'd still have the large corporations to feed off.

True, and I suppose there's no reason to assume patent trolls will behave rationally as a group.

Right - there's probably nothing to stop a 'tragedy of the commons' occurring, and money is fungible so they can just do something else with it when the cash cow dies.

Both can be true. It really might be unprofitable to be an indie developer (after factoring in the risk and cost of litigation), while simultaneously being clearly 'time to lobby for intervention'.

Also, the risk/reward of lobbying for intervention may be vastly higher than is practical for people who would otherwise be indie developers, so in practice going to work for a large corporation might be the only way to spend your life writing software rather than being a patent reform activist.

The patent system had an important purpose during the industrial revolution, and I believe it still has a place for "hard" innovations that require years or decades of research before becoming marketable.

But for trivial cases like most software patents, it is just something to prop up the established big companies (and keep lawyers fed) at the expense of emerging players.

I'm happy I'm in Canada? I mean sure, I'm certainly not protected 100% - if a patent troll wants to roll across me, there's definitely cross-border agreements to allow that.

That said, it's certainly different from what they're accustomed to due to that cross-border issue, and thus a bit more difficult and there are probably much easier targets within their immediate legal jurisdiction.

Not that it it really matters for me RIGHT NOW, since I only just launched the other day and revenue is a future dream, but it still assuages my fear a little.

As a fellow Canadian dev, I'd urge you to assume the worst case scenario for litigation. Or at the very least, consult with a lawyer. Patents can be defended across borders. At the very least, your life can be turned into hell.

Surely there must be a way to simply ignore the lawsuit the way OJ Simpson ignored his civil lawsuit [1].

[1] Well, he had to move, but the point is he didn't pay the people who sued him a dime. This is what I would want to do; make sure the ones who sued me got nothing.

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