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A provisional patent on the method would have been a really good thing to have in Footpath’s back pocket right now. When you’re building functionality that’s w
by zaroth 8y ago
A provisional patent on the method would have been a really good thing to have in Footpath’s back pocket right now.
When you’re building functionality that’s whizz-bang cool and brand defining but that’s totally on display, when it’s one of those things that once you see it it becomes “obvious” that was the way to do it... a provisional patent could be the best ~$100 you ever spent.
IANAL, but provisional patents are double-edge swords. You have to file before an offer to sale or launching the functionality in your app, and you need to describe in enough detail what it is you are doing and how it is that you do it. You don’t have to translate this into patent-ese claims at this stage. But any claim you ultimately make in a full application claiming the priority date of the provisional must be fully supported by the provisional text, so it’s good to put everything you’ve thought of to that point in.
The other side the sword is that as soon as you file, a clock starts counting, you have 1 year from filing to make a full-blown patent application based on the provisional, or everything in the provisional then becomes theoretically unpatentable. Since full patent applications are expensive, it’s like a liability on your balance sheet for the next 12 months, because there will be pressure to spend the $10k+ to not “lose” the provisional.
One smaller benefit is that the priority date on the provisional is iron-clad protection against any patent on the same subject matter that is filed after that date.
I would not at all be surprised in a case like this to see Strava try to file some patents on the (copy-cat) feature they just launched. They might not go head-on, but try to patent back-end algorithms that they developed “independently” that probably line up closely with what Footpath already has — because it’s the natural way to approach the problem.
- shereadsthenews 8y agoHN is for software patents now?
- icebraining 8y agoSome HN users have always been for software patents. Others are not. Despite the groupthink tendencies, HN users do disagree about things.
- zaroth 8y agoI certainly don’t speak for HN, but if there’s one case to made for software patents, IMO it’s narrowly focused claims for an innovation that is highly visible on the front-end of your product, or is the defining feature of your product. The type of thing that your competitors never even thought to do until they saw you doing it, and then can cheaply copy in a weekend hackathon. Drawing a line on a map and having it snap to a route is probably not in itself novel. There may be things that Footpath is doing that turn a “cool idea in practice which doesn’t really work” into a exciting user experience that delivers a lot of value to their customers. Perhaps Footpath has even spent a large share of their limited engineering resources refining the feature to this point. That hypothetical situation to me is exactly when you at least file the provisional. Even if you never file the utility patent, you can claim “Patent Pending” and [US] competitors would be more likely to hold off on cloning your UX straight away, or could maybe tilt the scales toward an acquisition. A generic “snap drawing to route” should not be patentable due to I’m sure copious prior art. The question is if there’s something unique Footpath is doing to make it work particularly well for their users (TFA hunted that there was) that breaks new ground.
- weego 8y agoTheir implementation wasn't novel. This is well trodden ground.
- greglindahl 8y agoSoftware patents haven't carried much weight since Alice, and it doesn't sound like Footpath was the first with this kind of feature. So your advice involves spending a lot of money to try for a patent, and then spend more money to threaten or sue Strava, and then have to pay Strava's legal fees after the patent is thrown out on Alice or prior art grounds.