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Ask HN: I thought of an idea but I think Microsoft has it patented. What to do?

1 points by jasonlfunk ↗ HN
I was thinking about writing a payment gateway abstraction layer to allow for developers to be able to change their payment gateway (Auth.net to Stripe, for example) without having to change their implementation code. Basically do for payments what PHP's PDO or Ruby's DBI does for databases.

A simple Google search to find if one existed discovered this patent by Microsoft: http://www.google.com/patents/US20080086417

What should I do now? The patent seems to be exactly what I thought of but as far as I far as I've looked, nothing was ever written. Can I still write one? Could I be sued for infringement? What if it was open source, does that change anything?

4 comments

[ 6.1 ms ] story [ 15.3 ms ] thread
jeffmould
Are you referring to something similar to: http://spreedly.com
rrouse
That uses, as far as I can tell, ActiveMerchant anyway. ActiveMerchant was built by Shopify if I remember correctly
HillRat
XAuthorize.net sold a similar product for a number of years. I'd think that (not having done more than skim the patent) it would count as prior art in the event MSFT wanted to protect that IP -- assuming that it could pass the non-obviousness test.
throwawaykf02
I'm on a mobile device, so I cannot research as much as I'd like, but this is just a patent application, not an issued patent, and more encouragingly, a quick glance at USPTO pair shows that is was abandoned in 2010. It was abandoned following a non-final rejection by the examiner.

Now it doesn't mean that it's dead for good, since abandoned applications can often be revived, but given that it's Microsoft, who has enough resources to pursue even trivial patents, and that it has been 3 years since it was abandoned, I'd be cautiously optimistic.

On the other hand, it has been referenced by a bunch of other patents, indicating they cover similar subject matter, so you should look into them too.

PS being open source won't save you from infringement.