Hit a wall with my ongoing game project because of patents

Question

I've been working on a custom renderer that uses compute shaders to do pathtracing. The idea was to use Rust/WASM/WebGPU so I could upload a demo directly to the web, so people could play it as easily as clicking a link. Additionally I thought that I could achieve acceptable performance with a combination of new techniques and algorithms as well as using lower-fidelity textures+meshes.Over the past 1.5 years I've basically read every single raytracing paper published in the past 10 years, and have been slowly working to implement relevant papers into this renderer. Recently I found out that one of those papers was patented, and there's no way to use the ideas inside it[1]. This by itself is not a huge issue as I can avoid using the technique and I don't think it will have a massive impact on performance. The bigger issue is that I don't know what other algorithms are patented that I have no idea about. Maybe some of those algorithms are just straight necessary in order to hit any reasonable performance guideline. In that case, this whole project is fucked and I should go do something else.I feel seriously disheartened about the whole thing now. I do not currently have any income, and I do not have enough money to fight off a lawsuit. Even hiring a lawyer to search for potential patent-infringement seems extremely expensive. I don't know if I should give up on this entirely and move to using a commercial game engine, keep working on this and ignore the existence of patents (except the one I found), keep working on this and search out for more patents to make sure I'm not infringing anything, or do something radically different altogether.[1] The patent # is 10580193, but I would not recommend looking it up if you are in graphics work due to how willful infringement works.

uptown · Accepted Answer

IANAL but sounds like you're overthinking everything. Don't worry about being sued into oblivion. You have nothing yet worth being sued over. Focus on making something useful. If it is --- you'll have other problems before you have patent infringement problems.

catlover76 · Answer

I don't understand--is this a side project, or is it a thing you are trying to sell?

joshxyz · Answer

i havent encountered this in my life yet but how does this work? can people just ask for permission to use that approach? do they have to be paid in royalties? are they patenting processes (flexible) or procedures (specific, sequential)?

android521 · Answer

You have already invested 1.5 years into it and it seems like you're making a cool product. Just continue and focus on creating a great product and deal with the other things later. Chances are no one will bother to contact you unless you become one of the big companies. By then, you will have enough resources to handle it. It is a shame that software patent is hindering innovation instead of promoting it.

havnagiggle · Answer

IANAL and also have no experience in this, but there is such a thing as patent and IP insurance. Both offensive and defensive. I am sure there are also companies that can perform code audits to find potential infringements early at varying degrees of quality. That of course all costs money.The other important thing is to have appropriate incorporation and liability insurance once you are actually exposing yourself as an entity.

chromoblob · Answer

You either need to hire a patent lawyer or be prepared to pay plaintiff's attorney and court costs in the worst case that a patent owner sues you and doesn't want to make a licensing deal. (If going hardcore, you could also try to perform the work of patent lawyer yourself, but you would need to have sufficient patent law knowledge and still assume the risk of missing some unlucky patents with uncooperative owners.) Moderate funding of this risk would be sufficient. If you don't have this initial money but you're confident that you will find certain profit, maybe take a loan?Many patent owners would be glad to find a new licensee at a fair price. Since you intend to commercialize your project, you will be able to pay reasonable license fees as you make sales.

djohnston · Answer

Just build the damn thing.

bhouston · Answer

Did you know you can continue and if they come after you if the future, which likely won't happen because you'd have to be successful first and they will have to be actively trying to enforce this patent and then notice you, and that combination by itself is hard enough to achieve, you can actually settle with them and they will likely price it in a way that you can actually afford to pay it.
The large majority of patent owners are in it to make money. They will sue a billion dollar company to get a large settlement a they will try to get a small settlement out of a small company. Basically no matter what size you are, they will try to make it affordable for that company, but it is a negotiation.
Now I am not a lawyer, but I've been through this and have been a party to those negotiations. You'll be fine.
Also anyone in software is likely violated a whole raft of patents that you don't know about. The field is littered with overboard patents that you would not even think apply to you. We will likely be fine since most of those patents are not being enforced and also we will likely be fine if they are enforced because they will go after the big firms before they come after us.

farseer · Answer

You could have just remained quite and nothing would have come of it. It takes significant technical resources to catch a software patent violation, especially for closed sources ones and no one bothers unless you manage to make a boat load of money. But you publicly posted your concerns and even the patent number, someone will definitely keep tabs on your side projects now.Negative thoughts do bring bad luck after all :)

speedgoose · Answer

If you are in a jurisdiction without software patents you could always ignore those and sell your game only in jurisdictions without software patents.