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).
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.
