Company: APPF
Filing Date: 2025-02-06
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0001433195-25-000013
Chunk: 28

Company: APPFOLIO INC
Filing Date: 2025-02-06
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 1A
Chunk 28
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 own products and services, which could harm our business. In addition, third parties may independently develop technologies or products that compete with ours, and we may be unable to prevent such competition. We cannot be certain that our means of protecting our intellectual property rights will be adequate or that our competitors will not independently develop similar technologies or products. To monitor and protect our intellectual property rights, we may be required to expend significant resources. Litigation brought to protect and enforce our intellectual property rights could be costly, time-consuming and distracting to management, and result in the impairment or loss of portions of our intellectual property or require us to pay costly royalties. Our failure to secure, protect and enforce our intellectual property rights could adversely affect our business, financial condition and operating results.

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We may be sued by third parties for alleged infringement of their proprietary rights, which could cause us to incur significant expenses and require us to pay substantial damages.

Our success depends, in part, on us refraining from infringing upon the intellectual property rights of others. Our competitors, as well as a number of other entities and individuals, may legally own or claim to own intellectual property relating to our technology or solutions, including without limitation technology we develop and build internally and/or acquire. From time to time, our competitors or other third parties may claim that we are infringing upon their intellectual property rights. Any claims or litigation, regardless of merit, could cause us to incur significant expenses, distract management, and, if successfully asserted against us, could require that we pay substantial damages, settlement costs or ongoing royalty payments, require that we comply with other unfavorable license and other terms, or prevent us from offering our solutions in their current form, including due to the unavailability of commercially reasonable licensing terms. 

Our solutions contain open source and third-party software, which may pose risks to our proprietary source code and/or introduce security vulnerabilities, and could have a material adverse impact on our business and operating results.

We use open source software in our solutions and expect to continue to do so in the future. The terms of many open source licenses to which we are subject have not been interpreted by United States or foreign courts, and there is a risk that open source licenses could be construed in a manner that imposes unanticipated conditions, restrictions or costs on our ability to provide or distribute our solutions. Additionally, we may from time to time face claims from third parties alleging ownership of, or demanding release of, the open source software or of derivative works that we developed using such software, which could include our proprietary source code