Yep, she actually tried to sell us the patent and later told us that someone else had offered $5 million for it, perhaps to increase the asking price.

We went back and forth with Jill over email, with support from the Stanford Law Clinic, and our conversation eventually petered out when we did not jump on the sale. Of course we’re not going to buy an invalid patent!

This is where we stand today. Chibitronics is still going strong making and selling LED stickers to the world and, as far as I can tell, Jill still owns a patent on LED stickers. It sounds like a precarious situation, but things seem to be okay.

How are you so calm?

Things seem fine now but will this sleeping patent come back to bite us one day? Possibly. Apparently it’s common for people to wait until a company is big enough before going after them with a lawsuit, because only then does the company have enough money for the lawsuit to be worth it. However, even if Jill does decide to take us to court over patent infringement, there is so much evidence of prior art on our side that we would simply invalidate her LED stickers patent.

As a result, aside from the occasional ragequit feelings from having someone else’s name on my and my collaborators’ work, we are fine as long as we can continue running Chibitronics: making and selling circuit stickers, sharing the joy of building electronics through crafting, and getting more people designing their own technologies. That’s the important part, the whole point of our work.

What I learned

The scariest thing to me about having a backer patent my crowdfunded project, is that now releasing my work out into the open internet suddenly feels like I’m leaving it vulnerable to be patented by anyone on the web. Ironically, the better the project, the more viral it becomes and the more people will see it, making it more likely that one of those people is a patent troll who might come after the work.

At the same time, the more we share our ideas out on the internet, and other media outlets, the more prior art we create. Even if the patent examiner misses it and issues a patent based on our work, the prior art still helps strengthen a case against the patent if the issue reaches court.

I also learned that even if something starts within the warm and fuzzy nest of open source, it may not stay there. In our case, our project bridged a patent-light community (open source hardware makers) and a patent-heavy community (the craft supply industry). So it’s worth noting—especially you open makers out there—that as your creations grow in scale and reach new communities, be aware that you may start running into similar situations around patents.

Even then, things may not be as dire as they seem. Though Jill has the patent on LED stickers, Chibitronics is still going strong. This means that even if someone manages to patent your work, it doesn’t matter so much if they don’t take legal action against you (that is, if they don’t sue you). And unless you or your company happens to be incredibly wealthy, it’s unlikely that someone will sue you because it probably wouldn’t be worth their time and money.

So though I’m not happy to be in this complicated patent situation, I’m still glad that we chose to share our ideas as openly and as broadly as possible. Rather than spending our limited resources worrying about securing and defending patent rights, we jumped right into figuring out how to make the product real, at scale and in an affordable way—which are core practical challenges of getting a project out into the world.

At the end of the day, there are so many things between having a dream and seeing your idea make a real impact. The legal side is just one aspect of deploying a project. I’ve learned that while it’s important to be informed, so that you don’t panic when patent issues arise, don’t let the legal issues stop you or scare you away from sharing your work with the world.