Re: patent violation exposure when adding an incremental and novelmissing piece

Claus wrote:

> Thanks - then how do database companies and software companies get
> going when there are patents on general "information storage and
> retrievel" mechanisms, or software that "accesses information storage,
> writes, reads, or updates data" ?  Does that mean everyone in the
> commercial software industry is paying royalties for all these general
> patents ?

It seems that you're talking about the generic patents which have snuck 
into the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. For example, I can conduct a 
search for "financial AND software" in the "Abstract" field at the 
USPTO's online patent search 
(<http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/search-bool.html>), and the first 
three patents which show up (6604124, 6601761, 6581068) are arguably not 
new and would be rather obvious to most software authors.

What you should do really depends on your situation. Holders of 
wide-reaching software patents have been concentrating their efforts on 
getting money from the Fortune 500 companies and have tended to ignore 
smaller companies, but this could change in the future.

If you want to avoid paying royalties, your best bet would be to have 
examples of prior art for any patents relating to your product. 
Unfortunately, there's no guarantee that you won't end up in court 
regardless. You may want to subscribe to the [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing 
list (<http://www.aful.org/mailman/listinfo/patents>) and read through 
its archive. And if this is a serious endeavor, USENET is no substitute 
for real legal advice.

-Chris