Intellectual Property

What is the expected cost of a patent these days? I remember $20k used to be the avg starting point has that changed and what makes sense for an OSS project that’s also commercial in nature?

@backpack making money work better
anagency.xyz if you want to build something ridiculous 
/backpack
/notdevin
icebreaker.xyz/notdevin

As far as what makes sense for an OSS project, idk much about software patents honestly so it’s hard to say, but best place to start is usually reaching out to a patent attorney and seeing if they’ll give a free consultation.

Same answer for hardware OSS, and do you have any favorite attorneys on this?

I'm down to be shilled for sure, so thank you. If my plan is for the designs to be open source, is it still advantageous to get the patent to ensure nobody can claim it to contain it, or if i push the designs OSS does that negate any future patentability?

I’ll shill my firm haha, we have a lot of EE/CS people that might be able to help. Can’t promise anything though. https://www.traskbritt.com/contact-us/

There are also a lot of other good small firms in Salt Lake. Only firm Im personally aware of in the PNW is Seed IP, I’m sure there are tons up there tho.

As a disclaimer I’m still in law school, but with hardware I think your options are basically patent or trade secret. Software you could also copyright. Patents are the strongest protection tho.