As I understand it there has been no successful enforcement of a software patent so far, and it's ridiculously unlikely that I (as opposed to any other actor in this space) will be the first case. So yeah, I'll take that risk.

I would love that you be right. However, here are examples of successfully enforced software patents:

- in Europe: http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Civ/2002/1702.html

- in US: https://web.archive.org/web/20061205050434/http://eolas.com/...

But as I said, if your startup is being sued by Dolby, whether the enforcement is successful or not is actually irrelevant. Showing that your work doesn't infringe a patent, or that Dolby's patent is invalid, is a money and time-consuming process (unsurprisingly, patents are not generally written to facilitate re-implementation or defense).

(Moreover, in the US, in some cases, the patent owner might even get a preliminary injunction ( https://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/jom/matters/matters-9712.h... ), which might seriously and immediately harm your business. I don't know if such a thing exists in Europe).

Big tech companies like Dolby and IBM use a preventive racket-looking technique ; it involves trying to sell to potential infringers a "protective" subscription, but there's no preliminary analysis of whether there actually is any patent being infringed.

During broadcasting tech events like IBC or NAB, Dolby actually sends people to other company's booths for this ; and there's a famous story about IBM against small-at-this-time SUN : https://www.forbes.com/asap/2002/0624/044.html , whose gist is:

> "OK," [the IBM lawyer] said, "maybe you don't infringe these seven patents. But we have 10,000 U.S. patents.

> Do you really want us to go back to Armonk [IBM headquarters in New York] and find seven patents you do infringe?

> Or do you want to make this easy and just pay us $20 million?"

I meant in Europe, and that case is not successful enforcement of a software patent (merely a preliminary question as to whether some jurisdiction weirdness could be a reason that William Hill did not infringe on a patent); in fact there was no question to the court as to whether the patent was valid, and the case ended with an answer to the question asked.

This is a quirk of some UK courts, where you can literally just start a case to ask a question on some detail of the law and get an answer.

The question was:

> "Is it a defence to the claim under s.60(2) of the Patents Act 1977, if otherwise good, that the host computer claimed in the patent in suit is not present in the UK, but is connected to the rest of the apparatus claimed in the patent."

From Wikipedia:

> Questions of validity were never considered by the court.