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Education

of an IP-violation claim by the person utility in your product that you might not have seen yourself. Be prepared for
whose code was copied without your groaner feature to be another person’s valuable treat.
permission—even if the developer
wins the case—the claim could waste The points listed above each have a legal component, but they speak to a greater
time, attract negative publicity and aim: the goal of owning something unique to sell.
also shake the confidence of investors In publishing The Green Sheet, neither the author nor the publisher is engaged in rendering legal,
and clients.
accounting or other professional services. If legal advice or other expert assistance is required,
Nothing is better than owning all the services of a competent professional should be sought. For further information on this article,
the code to your product. Clients, please contact Adam Atlas, Attorney at Law via email at atlas@adamatlas.com or by phone at
partners and investors will all want 514-842-0886.
to see this and will reward the
developer accordingly. Ensuring
that the code has not been copied
requires effort on the part of the
company carrying out the work. It
also requires a degree of trust in the
individual programmers.
Patent early and often

Not everything is patentable, but
for a novel new product, it’s worth
running patent searches with an
IP lawyer to see if there is room to
file a potentially winning patent
application.

Don’t wait until the product is
publicized. Indeed, novel ideas
and the search for patentability of
those ideas must be done with the
utmost confidentiality, otherwise
the developer risks losing the patent
rights altogether.

If it turns out the product is not
patentable, that’s not the end of
the world; there are plenty of
unpatented technologies that have
been immensely rewarding for their
creators.
Build for scale and flexibility

When a child builds a sand castle
on the beach, that castle is the whole
world for them at that time. When
building a product in payments,
be prepared for the product—in an
instant—to occupy the whole beach
or all beaches. Instruct programmers
to build with an eye toward growth
and flexibility. Cloud hosting services
like AWS are built to accommodate
this kind of thinking.

And flexibility should pertain not
only to size, but also to features and
functionality. Some licensees, buyers
and investors will see a particular
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