

Ask HN: How to protect yourself against patents from your own product? - agilord

Imagine a company that comes out with a great product with some interesting ideas, but nothing Earth-shaking, just a better combination of the known things.<p>A patent-troll realizes that the ideas were not patented, he files for the patents, receives them and sues the company a few years later for big money.<p>How can one possibly defend themselves from such scenario? (Let's suppose the company wouldn't like to spend money on their own patent-applications.)
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agilord
As one answer, I do remember an advice from years ago:

1\. Write down the ideas and some of implementation details in a book.

2\. Submit it to Lulu or other self-publishing site, order a few copies to
yourself, but don't open some of them.

3\. If the case comes to court, you can provide the package with the postal
stamp on it, and the content of the book shows that you were aware of the idea
before the patent-troll filed for the patent.

One issue with this is that the court might reject the package with the postal
stamp, so it might be useful if you have a copy with a notary signature or
like that.

Please let me know if you see any flaw with this approach or share if you have
a better one.

~~~
wmf
I think that's kind of a cargo-cult answer. See
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defensive_publication>
<http://www.defensivepublications.org/defensive-pubs-faqs> for modern
approaches.

~~~
agilord
Thanks for the link, it was refreshing to read it!

I guess by 'modern approaches' you mean (and the faq suggests) that making
everything public and highly visible. The idea behind the "publish it as book"
is that it makes it public, but not that highly visible. I guess it depends on
the business requirements.

Btw. it was not clear from the site how much it costs. Is it entirely free?

