[Clarification: In all of the below, I'm talking about patent-checking to guard against infringement of others' patents, rather than protecting my own stuff]
When you've got an idea you like and believe in, how much time should you dedicate to patent research before getting into proper planning, coding and all the rest of the fun stuff?
a) Lots, be exhaustive
b) Some [any estimates of how much?]
c) None, just get it out there
I ask because a couple of years ago, for a startup that didn't make it to market (for a reason totally unconnected with patents), I spent the best part of two soul-destroying months poring over lots and lots of chunky patent documents, looking for things that might block what we were trying to do.
After all that time, an IP lawyer friend of mine said (in more or less these words) 'Just get it out there and see if anyone complains, then deal with it'. I'm operating in the UK, too, which seems to have a more favourable (for me) view of the ridiculousness of [edit] some [/edit] software patents, too, in the sense that they're harder to enforce over here, I gather. So in the end, we just went ahead (but then got sunk by another issue, but that's a different story, dammit.)
So, I was just wondering what the HN community thinks about it all. Did you spend ages poring over patents before cutting any code, too?
At first I thought you were doing a patent search to apply for a patent - which makes sense. But on rereading, I think you're just checking to be sure that you're not infringing on anyone else's patents. I agree with your IP friend: if you're not going to patent your invention - there's no point searching at all (and there's even the risk of triple punitive damages in some jurisdictions, as sgrove noted.)
If you infringe on someone's patent (and they care), you can probably code around it. But unless you are competing directly with their product, they won't care. Here's pg's take on it:
What does that mean in practice? We tell the startups we fund not to worry about infringing patents, because startups rarely get sued for patent infringement. There are only two reasons someone might sue you: for money, or to prevent you from competing with them. Startups are too poor to be worth suing for money. And in practice they don't seem to get sued much by competitors, either. They don't get sued by other startups because (a) patent suits are an expensive distraction, and (b) since the other startups are as young as they are, their patents probably haven't issued yet. [3] Nor do startups, at least in the software business, seem to get sued much by established competitors. Despite all the patents Microsoft holds, I don't know of an instance where they sued a startup for patent infringement. Companies like Microsoft and Oracle don't win by winning lawsuits. That's too uncertain. They win by locking competitors out of their sales channels. If you do manage to threaten them, they're more likely to buy you than sue you. http://www.paulgraham.com/softwarepatents.html