Good that you raised the point of language. This is already a problem in the area of chip (IC) manufacturing. A very large number of newly designed chips now have their specifications published only in Chinese.
The Chinese language does not lend itself to easy translation to English. It always gets "easier", but not quite good enough. At least not for sophisticated purposes like research.
Please don't misunderstand when I say this: your own tech team is best positioned to help you with this. Be humble/open throughout the whole process. Maybe start with the junior most dev and move on/up. Pretend you're a noob tech intern. It is up to you how deep you want to go based on what you learn from them, you can always ask for books/articles to educate yourself better on specific areas.
> "I'm just not sure how we should address those issues"
Neither is anyone else imo but I do think a good starting point might be creating actual awareness about said issues. And I don't mean issuing out public memos - which, imo, has been the approach so far. It might be better to use standard commercial/marketing tactics toward a different goal, i.e raising awareness. Create fud about privacy. Sure, it'll involve a bit of ingenuity and disingenuousness but the awareness will get raised. Make up lifelike examples and have them worked into the stories in popular sitcoms/movies. No guarantees it'll work, but I do believe it'll work better than simple blogs and informational videos, which imo might be too dull and dry for the average user.
Minor point: a rational person who can afford only a Mazda Miata oughtn't take a Ferrari for the same price for the simple reason they can ill afford it's running costs (fuel, maintenance, etc.).
I have a pack of dogs. And they all hunt opportunistically. There're plenty of (mostly eaten) prey corpses strewn over the acreage. Anecdotal I know but I'm sure you can read up on prey drive in numerous dog breeds.
You/we ARE a part of nature. If 100% of people care about doing certain things (that they actually have control over) in a certain way, that's the same as nature doing it that way. When it's a smaller percentage, that's just that thing happening in different ways.
We already have legal advice. While advice from random strangers ought to be take with a pack of salt, random strangers have little vested interest in the topic and nothing to lose plus a very fresh perspective. Hence there's a likelihood of unbiased (if a tad uninformed) opinions.
So the things you say, and danieltillet says, are basically the things I'm looking for. And I hope more folks chime in too, particularly if they've experienced situations like this.
We are indeed starting to double/treble down on sales (thanks for the little "slogans" too). The majority opinion leans towards a fight, since for each seller we have BigCo has 100-1000. Their scale can let them get away with a cheap knockoff that mostly replicates the functionality but lacks in UI/UX. And I'm sure you know sellers are more interested in the scale, margins, etc. of a platform. So while we can take the market, it might have to be off more than just 1-2 patents.
Besides, there's always the hope that a court side with David rather than Goliath. And if they don't, and we lose the appeals too, we end up where we started and can only outsell them. And if we can survive long enough to win, we might as well get paid for lost revenues.
A fight there'll be. Too many in favor.
Any clues where I could get info on past instances like this or examples of underbelly tactics would be much appreciated...
Reason I posted here (with a throwaway account) was I hoped (based on the crowd here, and certain comments I'd seen in the past alluding to related first/second hand experiences) to hear from someone who had encountered this sort of situation before.
That's also what the founder instinctively suggests. I don't disagree. But my posting here stems from certain concerns:
1. BigCo can easily outlawyer us
2. Tangentially related to 1, BigCo is likely to own a classic 'portfolio' which could be unleashed on us. While many individual patents in the portfolio might be of dubious validity, fighting them off will be a very expensive game.