legal advice for a beginner

Please forgive the general nature of this question, I'm simply a beginner looking for direction and advice.

As an engineer, I do not have a background in business but I've recently taken an interest in online startups. Specifically, I've thought about launching an online dating service which is unique in a number of ways. I would be building off of the general idea of having an online profile and adding unique ways for people to meet and interact.

I'm a little stumped on how I would go about protecting my idea. Assuming that I went through the trouble of getting the service up and going, what would stop other clone services from popping up using the same concept? To what extent would I be able to protect my idea?

What would be my first legal steps for starting a business like this?

Any direction or advice would be greatly appreciated!

The only way you can force clone sites to close (you can't stop them from popping up) is through having a patent and enforcing it actively.

A patent will cost you around $10-20K to start with just getting a patent search done and your first provisional patent application drafted and in. It will be maybe $50-100K to follow through and register worldwide. Having the patent won't stop the clones, though, the next step is to prosecute clones. This may simply be a legal letter to scare them off, or you may need to take them to court (fill in a dollar value here) ... and you may or may not win.

This all assumes your idea is patentable. Many ideas, although they may sound wonderful and original to you, don't have what it takes to get a patent. So you may find out in the first few thousand dollars that you have something you can't patent. At a minimum, before you spend a penny, you should search the US patent database (made available free by the government) and see who else has patented something in the same area, and read all their patents, just to see if your idea (1) is original, and (2) is the type of thing that other people seem to have patented.

Many new entrepreneurs worry too much about the value of the idea. Ideas are a dime a dozen. What matters is having the team who can execute it and make it real. You are probably further ahead investing your money to build the business than you are patenting (by the way, you can't enforce your patent unless you are actually using it in a business anyway).