Life for a startup on the receiving end of a patent law suit

Also, the website is a little unclear about what exactly customers are buying. "Search for prior art" -- it sounds like you're charging people $10k to copy-paste the sentences from their product's specs one-by-one into Google. What exactly are your customers paying for? It's not clear on your website.

Remember, you probably have a decent understanding of patent law if you have a JD, but your customers don't. Your target audience is (I'm guessing) similar to much of HN -- intelligent hackers who have a good business sense but little formal training in law or business. Hackers'll want to know the "how" and "why" of what they're buying, but your explanations don't explain legal jargon like "examining applications," "prior art search," or "ex parte".

Also, I would suggest offering services on contingency-fee basis -- you only get paid if you actually bust one or more patents at least dimly related to your customer's business, or produce some other sort of tangible result for the customer. To make this financially viable for you, you may need to substantially increase your fee for contingency clients, and have cash reserves in case you lose multiple re-examinations in a row.

Also it'd be nice to show patents you've busted. If you don't have any yet, you might consider looking for easy patents to target, and self-funding a re-examination of them, or (if you don't have the money or it's against the rules for a lawyer to bring such a case on their own initiative) approaching the EFF or somebody to ask if they'll fund you.

Let's assume that's happened before anyway..

What if you use a foreign domain name?

What are the non-US based methods of receiving payment online?

Are there any viable foreign servers that are fast enough to service the US but whose country does not have patent agreements with the US?

I feel like there are options here that may not have been tried. Presumably a patent troll could try to tell your payment service and US based servers not to do business with you, but I haven't heard of that either, aside from credit card companies blocking Wikileaks and the US govt seizing servers suspected of hosting illegal stuff. I forgot why the US govt seized servers in VA a few years back but the point is that is pretty unusual too and I wonder how far a patent troll would go or how difficult it would be for them to get through all that.

The only way China blocks Facebook, for example, is through a massive firewall, and their businesses generally don't accept any foreign credit cards. The US seems unlikely to put in a huge firewall or modify DNSs to go after small businesses for patent trolls..

Only if you're a hardware startup.

If you're doing software as a service and you can deal with latency issues, you can operate many places where US patent law doesn't apply to you or to your customers. Canada and Mexico have high speed connections to the USA and Germany or Korea aren't so slow either.

Note that in both those cases, the justices that were skeptical of software patents were those typically classified as the "left"-wing justices. I have no idea why that happens. Dr. Lessig had a theory in Eldred v. Ashcroft that he could win over "right"-wing justices for textual literalist copyright reform but it was only the "left" justices that finally agreed with reason in that case; even then it was only the most avid patent reformers he won over: Stevens and Breyer.