So, if a person wants to start a company, how can he make sure it's not breaking any patent that could cost him money and a legal mess later?, I suppose a few hours of investigation previous starting up is not enough...
This is in my opinion the biggest problem with the patent system. The bars for obviousness and novelty are too low if startups need to start worrying about whether they're accidentally coming up with the same designs as existing companies. Provable independent invention needs to be a defense to patent infringement.
The current dance around the broken patent system look something like this :
- When you are small, nobody will come to get you because you are not interesting enough for troll of big compagnies (except maybe other direct competitor but it's unlikely)
- Then you become bigger and you will have to deal with licenses from other compagnies and trolls.
- At that point you become defensive, and start to patent things yourself.
- Then you are unwilling to fight against patents because it starts to be an asset for you. And you might even be tempted to go to the dark side and use them to attack other companies at this point.
The good news in all that is that when you are a small company in software, you should not worry too much about patent. I don't remember any startup failing because of that...
Absolutely not. First, I have heard anecdotes about patents for (device and method for) transferring data over a network. Second, if you know about a patent you are now wilfully infringing and will get triple damages in court.
But don't worry, the patent trolls only want income, so they'll demand you license their patent at a price carefully calculated to be your revenue minus your costs.
I understand it to generally be simply not possible. Any product is going to be infringing on dozens of patents held by any of the big companies in the field.
