

Ask HN: Patents and Patenting - should I stop now? - rschmitty

Ask HN: Patents and Patenting - should I stop now?<p>Dear HN: I&#x27;ve been working on a weekend project where it involves generating a schedule and ultimately printing out a calendar for the client to take home.<p>When trying to find competitors for this I could not find anyone else doing this specialized calendar (doesn&#x27;t mean they don&#x27;t exist of course)<p>After not finding results I then searched patents, and couldn&#x27;t find any related (again I realize it is not 100% not out there)<p>However I did come across a generic &#x27;calendar generator&#x27; patent: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;patents&#x2F;US20050257176<p>Does this mean I would need to license calendar generation in order to continue (or hope sales are never much such that I&#x27;m never a target)?
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beat
It means you need to hire a professional patent attorney to do a proper patent
search, discuss your tech with you, and probably apply for a defensive patent
(or alternately, get a license from the original patent holder, especially if
they aren't really using the patent on a competing product).

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alexdevkar
I'm not going to go as far as giving legal advice here, but don't blindly
follow the advice above. Doing a patent search can be harmful because it gives
you knowledge of the existence of the patents (which is legally significant).
Approaching someone for a license can bring unnecessary attention.

Most of all, spending time and money on getting a patent often doesn't make
sense.

