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

[rschmitty]

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

Dear HN: I'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.

When trying to find competitors for this I could not find anyone else doing this specialized calendar (doesn't mean they don't exist of course)

After not finding results I then searched patents, and couldn't find any related (again I realize it is not 100% not out there)

However I did come across a generic 'calendar generator' patent: https://www.google.com/patents/US20050257176

Does this mean I would need to license calendar generation in order to continue (or hope sales are never much such that I'm never a target)?

[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).

[alexdevkar → beat]

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.