[praveenweb]

How does one developing a product find out if they are infringing a patent? Apart from the Apple/Samsung patent battle few years ago and to an extent Google/Oracle battle, I don’t remember anything in the tech space leveraging this.

Is there a list of companies that got screwed by giant companies because they unknowingly infringed a patent?

[dathinab]

Due to the US patent amt granting all kind of patents which should never have been granted (due to e.g. priority art or triviality of the patent) it's basically impossible today to do anything in tech without braking patents.

For example one person patented the wheel and got the patent granted, or recently I found that some company on zooming in and out on a graph or automatically shutting down computers when they are not used.

Normally large tech companies don't use any of this patents, it's not in their interest to make it obvious how broken the patent system is. But the problem starts once a company starts to fall and now tries to make money no matter what. Or this patents are bought up by patent trolls.

[patentatt]

What you would need is called a freedom to operate search and opinion. However, that’s not so much a thing anymore due to the risks involved and the state of patent validity proceedings mostly at the PTAB. And, at the end of the day, you could never know for sure if someone out there wouldn’t have a different opinion than yours and they’d sue you anyways. The system isn’t very efficient.

[nurettin]

Look for "patent troll" articles. You will find a few dozen unique links just on this website.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...