Hello,

It’s been a while since we last spoke about patents issues. I suppose that someone in here has now been able to sell his own multi-touch systems (FTIR or not), it would be very interesting if he explained the way to produce and sell MT products without law problems.

Any appreciation would be appreciated.

Thanks!

Gonzalo

no news from me… didn’t have the chance yet on a large scale…

I’m sure this is not the advice you’re looking for, but if you’re looking to commercialize a product you should really just play it safe and get some legal advice from a professional.  It’s just not worth the risk to see your endeavorer crushed under some legal issues.  At the very least you’ll want to do something like incorporate to protect yourself and you might want to talk to a lawyer about that anyway.

One way or another, any info you get here won’t cover you later if you didn’t talk to a lawyer and get into some hot water.

GuinnessKMF has the right of it.  As much as I hated shelling out the capital for legal council, it has been well worth it.  We’re gearing up to launch our product in full this August.  Paying for legal council has been wonderful because it meant that I didn’t have to spend my research and development time learning to be a part-time lawyer. 

My best advice is to shop for a lawyer who is familiar with technology in some way.  This will save you time and money in the long run as lawyers tend to translate time into money (from you).  For us, having a lawyer who could quickly understand the underlying technology of what we were doing saved us hours and meant that his research into patent and other legal issues could be focused on the correct issues quickly.

Also worth mentioning, most lawyers will perform an initial consultation for minimal to no cost.  This is part of how they establish clients.

As to how to find said lawyers, I can’t really help—sorry!  I happened to meet mine at a convention when I was demoing our first gen table.

As to incorporation, I used bizfilings.  This was not a trivial cost, but well worth it compared to the cost of having a lawyer setup the corporation for us.