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Have you dealt with a law troll?
I'm a cofounder of a 3-man Web startup. Recently a competitor sent us a threatening letter accusing us of stealing their proprietary information, and now they have begun filing patent applications. Their accusation was baseless, and their patent application is so broad it seems to cover anything with interactive data plots.
Anyway, the specifics of the accusation or patent aren't the issue here, and I am not asking HN for legal advice. We already have a lawyer. I am asking for practical business advice from people who have been through something similar.
Have you dealt with a law troll? What did you do?
- pg 16y agoIANAL but I'd ignore it. Especially the patent applications. A patent application is far removed from a patent, and even an issued patent is not that dangerous a weapon between two startups. You're 100x more likely to die from not making something users want than from this. So worry about the tiger chasing you rather than the possibility you'll be hit by a meteorite.
- jkl 16y agoI was hoping someone would say this, because I want my struggles to be about finding the right set of features do deliver, not about who invented what when. But to be clear, are you saying that your startup ran into some legal threats, that you more or less ignored them, and that strategy worked?
- pg 16y agoYes, actually, we did have someone from a competitor call Viaweb, telling us that we should license some bogus patent they'd been granted. I told the guy we thought the patent was bogus and we weren't interested, and he replied by asking if we were hiring. You can't ignore all legal threats, but I usually advise startups we fund to ignore threats from competitors involving IP.
- VanL 16y agoThis is right. Patents and patent games really only become important when you have enough money that people care about trying to take some of it away. For tech startups, execution is 100x more important. IAAPL, and the only time when I would recommend that a tech startup get a patent is when: - There is a hard technical problem that you solved that is core to your new product/service (think Google) - You are building a device that requires custom hardware. - You are in the Biotech space.
- PerryStallings 16y agoPatents are long term intangible assets. There are two reasons to patent a technology. 1) Protection. Pharmaceutical companies invest billions in drug development. Patents protect them from low cost providers coming in without the dev cost. 2) Licensing. The Unreal game engine is in hundreds of games. However with the accelerated development and apllication schedule in the tech industry, it is often more profitable to keep the technology in house. Unless you are developing products for licensing don't worry about patents. Conversely, startups that try to get into the patent game are not likely to have developed anything worth worrying about. Remember, the patent process takes time and you as the patent holder are required to police their property.
- staunch 16y ago> 2) Licensing. The Unreal game engine is in hundreds of games. You can license the right to use a patent, but you don't have to have a patent to license technology you own. Epic Games owns the engine technology (source code, documentation, data files, etc) that licensees pay for the right to use.
- nudge 16y agoPublish their threatening letter on your blog. Gain the respect of your customers, and new potential customers of yours and theirs, by being the good guys and showing them to be the ones that resort to legal threats to discourage healthy competition.
- _delirium 16y agoIn some areas this might work, but I'm not sure it's a good idea in general. That sort of thing plays well among tech-geek audiences, but I think not among more general audiences, who will be distracted at best, or scared off at worst.
- jkl 16y agoI, too, imagine that customers wouldn't appreciate the controversy. But what do I know? Has anyone had a positive (or negative) outcome from publicizing a legal threat?
- nudge 16y agoI think it very much depends on your customers. It's true that I was thinking of companies with very tech-oriented customers when I was remembering other cases of this. I can't remember exactly who they were though, sorry. But yes, I should have qualified my earlier response. This is only going to work for certain businesses. If your customers don't care, then I probably wouldn't bother.
- gyardley 16y agoThe first time someone threatened to sue my startup I took it very seriously and spent a lot of time worrying about it. I also ran up some legal bills talking to my counsel about it. The second time someone threatened to sue my startup I took it seriously and spent some time researching their claims but didn't bother with the counsel, since lawyers are pricey. The third time someone threatened to sue my startup I did a quick Google search on their name, archived the e-mail, and got on with it. Since once you've been at this for a while you'll get desensitized to idle threats, I recommend learning from my experience and skipping to the blasé stage immediately.