

Have you dealt with a law troll? - jkl

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.<p>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.<p>Have you dealt with a law troll?  What did you do?
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pg
IANAL 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
I 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
Yes, 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
This 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
Patents 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
> _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.

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gyardley
The 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.

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nudge
Publish 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
In 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
I, 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
I 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.

