Re: [tlug] Nice reply by Torvalds

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Josh Glover writes:

 > On 17/05/07, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen@example.com> wrote:
 > 
 > > Josh Glover writes:
 > >
 > >  > I seriously doubt this, for all reasonable definitions of "minimal".
 > >  > Has anyone reading this thread ever been involved in a patent search?
 > >  > How much time, effort, and money did it take?
 > >
 > > I have, as one of those asked about prior art.  My lawyer estimates a
 > > useful search for one potential patentable idea costs about $25,000.
 > 
 > OK, this would be "minimal" to a large corporation. But not to your
 > average Open Source hacker, and not to a small software shop.

Note, it's significantly smaller for the large corporation, because
they have people specializing in the patents of interest for the large
corporation, they have a lot of internal knowledge about unpatented
prior art, and they keep internal databases (as well as subscribing to
commercial ones).  But even so, companies like IBM and Microsoft file
thousands of patents per year; even at a half-off sale, that's
millions of dollars.

The normal solution is to not do the full search, just the parts that
can be automated.

And if you're writing a large program, you (in principle) have to
check every subroutine.  That is definitely not feasible for the small
shop.