You have a technology and you want to see if you can get patent protection for it. Let’s suppose that your prior art search is very thorough and there are no 101 and 102 issues, but you found some other technologies that, when combined in a “common sense” way, do the same thing as your technology. At this step, you decide not to pursue a patent application.
But does this finding mean that you, by using your technology, cannot be accused of direct infringement? Well, not really.
First of all, you can do direct infringement iff you, by yourself, infringe all the items in any given claim of a patent. And given the fact that your very thorough search returned no 102 issues, it must be that no patent contains claims upon which you infringe. However, the obviousness finding means that there might be at least one patent that contains a claim upon which you infringe with some part of your technology. So the answer is “Yes, you can be accused of direct infringement, even though no other single invention describes your whole invention”.
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