Now distribution is going mainstream with the App Store. And it’s already begun changing the lives and businesses of independent software developers. On the surface, it all looks good. There are more customers, increased revenues, and many great new products. But this expanded distribution is also putting our business at risk: there are people in this new market who claim a right to a part of our hard work. Either by patent or copyright infringement, developers are finding this new cost of litigation to be onerous. The scary part is that these infringements can happen with any part of our products or websites: things that you’d never imagine being a violation of someone else’s intellectual property. It feels like coding in a mine field.