I was once told by a VC to never do a patent search as the money spent on the search and analysis would be better spent on developing the idea. Bad advice?

If you do a search two things will happen:

1) You are now aware of the patent and continuing to willfully infringe

2) You're going to spend days obsessing on how your idea is different, or they didn't think of this or that, or this tiny edge case convincing yourself of non-infringement.

In both cases any patent litigation attorney worth their salt will absolutely murder you. The best part is so many broad patents exist that everything infringes on one.

It doesn't take much money to search. It does, however, expose you to treble damages due to "willful infringement".

I'm sure patent trolls would agree with that advice.

All advice from VCs tends to be bad, but legal advice from VCs should be dismissed outright.

The search is very cheap and easy, and then you can decide if the risk is worth it.

Everytime I hear about companies patenting everything, it really bothers me.

I wish we would tie patent fees to the assets of a company, or person. Basically the wealthy boys would pay much more for a patent, and low income individuals woukd pay less, or nothing.

So a big company might think twice about an exponential government fee when they are on their 100 patent.

Wouldn't they just get a homeless guy to register it, and then transfer it over to them? I'm all for the intent behind your system but execution has gotta be airtight

Then charge a transfer fee based on company size. Which they do currently have different fees based on size of company but I'm pretty sure it's negligible. The other problem is patent trolls. So, you might want to tie fees every year to lack of sales. That would also force companies to let the patents go faster.