How do you know if you are breaking copyright or patent law?
Well, copyright law is easy... if you haven't seen or copied the code of your competitor's product, there's no way you could be violating your copyright. Presumably you know if you've done that or not.
Patent is different, and I don't know that there's any easy answer to that one. But realistically speaking, anything you do has the potential to be a violation of someone's existing patent, so if you try for 100% upfront assurance that you're not violating any patents, you'd have to constrain yourself from ever building anything.
If you're really interested, you can search the various patent databases for patents owned by known competitors, but a lot of people avoid doing this because of the rules that make damages for "knowing patent infringement" stiffer than the ones for "accidental" (not a legal term, but you get the idea) patent infringement.
If the competitor is using PHP, and I use Python is that a different product in the view of the "patent"?
IANAL, but as I understand it, the answer is "not necessarily". I think if possible patent violations are a big concern, you have to just bite the bullet, hire patent attorneys, have them research the existing body of patents, and give you an opinion. I've never done it, but I'm guessing that doing that is not cheap. :-(
Well, copyright law is easy... if you haven't seen or copied the code of your competitor's product, there's no way you could be violating your copyright. Presumably you know if you've done that or not.
Patent is different, and I don't know that there's any easy answer to that one. But realistically speaking, anything you do has the potential to be a violation of someone's existing patent, so if you try for 100% upfront assurance that you're not violating any patents, you'd have to constrain yourself from ever building anything.
If you're really interested, you can search the various patent databases for patents owned by known competitors, but a lot of people avoid doing this because of the rules that make damages for "knowing patent infringement" stiffer than the ones for "accidental" (not a legal term, but you get the idea) patent infringement.
If the competitor is using PHP, and I use Python is that a different product in the view of the "patent"?
IANAL, but as I understand it, the answer is "not necessarily". I think if possible patent violations are a big concern, you have to just bite the bullet, hire patent attorneys, have them research the existing body of patents, and give you an opinion. I've never done it, but I'm guessing that doing that is not cheap. :-(