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Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview

• _drimzy 8y ago
  Dang, it's incredible that google didn't fire the "inventors" listed on the patent. This is blatant stealing.
  • perfunctory 8y ago
    Why would they fire somebody for following company's policy?
    • projektfu 8y ago
      It may actually be criminal.
• taneq 8y ago
  I'm amazed at how relaxed their response is. If I told someone about some of my work and then found out they'd tried to patent it, I would be pissed!
  • ezoe 8y ago
    Yeah, like wtf? >they offered to add me as an inventor on the patent application if it meant the applications could stand. I said no
    • jacquesm 8y ago
      That offer alone should be enough to can the whole thing.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • sneak 8y ago
    If you want your secrets to remain secret, you shouldn’t divulge your secrets.
    • mosselman 8y ago
      There is a big difference between open research that you don't want Google to lock away behind a patent and 'secrets'. Her ideas weren't secret, she just didn't want Google to own the patent to it.
    • cwingrav 8y ago
      If you want to protect your secrets, you should patent them so when someone figures out your secret, or in this case your creative idea, you have a leg to stand on. Otherwise, they figure out your secret or idea and you have nothing. This is the entire purpose of patents and, despite many of the current issues with patents, they are still effective in many cases. While you can argue patents are only paper, a valuable patent is worth defending. In this case, she was able to demonstrate prior art, meaning that a patent could not be granted since they have no idea to protect since it's been in the public domain (i.e. released to the world) and not an original/non-trivial idea. This is why academic publication, or in the past the use of laboratory journals, are useful in documenting time of the invention.
      • sneak 8y ago
        The patent system is just a mechanism that uses the threat of state violence to prop up the idea that an idea is property that can be owned. This concept is false, and the sooner people abandon that model the better off we will all be. The state can’t use the threat of violence to make pi equal to 3, to make a public domain codec a “google invention”, nor to deed title to the number two. Remember, parents are just an industrial incentive mechanism propped up by cops, nothing more.
        • monochromatic 8y ago
          You could say the same thing about any form of property.
  • buboard 8y ago
    Probably wouldnt ring nice for MIT to go to war with google
    • adventured 8y ago
      Interestingly enough in the hierarchy of power in that context, MIT has more than Google. MIT is free standing when it comes to their finances. They have a $16.4 billion endowment. So Google (etc) doesn't have economic leverage over them, such that MIT always needs money and can't afford to ever cross large organizations. If you get three or four of the better schools together in the conflict, Google would beg forgiveness. They desperately need access to the best those schools have to offer, and they know it. That access and relationship is worth more than gold or pride to them. Money? They've got so much they have no idea what to do with it. Get cut out of critical relationships with elite schools and that can take enough of your edge away over time that you start losing in subsequent competitive rounds of don't be killed by tech inflection.
      • aetimmes 8y ago
        The fact that a $16.4B endowment exists doesn't mean that any of it is available to fight a pissing match with Google (whose market cap is still ~45-50x MIT's endowment) - in my experience at a similar institution, I was told "we have $X in endowments, but all of it is essentially already spent" - it had been earmarked for various projects 5+ years in advance.
• natehouk 8y ago
  And Adobe stole my hyper-layer management patents too. What's your point?
• MarkMc 8y ago
  Reminds me of this cartoon: https://dilbert.com/strip/2006-05-06 https://dilbert.com/strip/2006-05-06
  • Gibbon1 8y ago
    First place I worked for had something like that except it was a supposed new customer that took their technical sales documentation and gave them to a competitor to develop a competing system. They also sent two of the competitors engineers to training sessions.
  • pbhjpbhj 8y ago
    [cartoon about interviewing an engineer to solve a product design problem]
• thaumasiotes 8y ago
  > I was even invited to share my work directly with Regina Dugan, the director of ATAP at that time! I was excited, thinking perhaps I would be invited for a summer internship. It turned out they found my work so relevant that they offered me a job on the spot. > It was a tough choice: I had just started the first year of my PhD and would’ve had to take a leave from the program to pursue this project. After asking many people, the advice was clear: stay in school. So I decided to turn down the offer and continue pursuing my PhD. ...this sounds like terrible advice? I have to wonder whether any of the "many people" consulted weren't professors.
  • Twisol 8y ago
    What makes this terrible advice? Is there something in particular about landing a job at Google that makes it objectively better in every value system than continuing with a PhD that one is already seeking? I left a very good position on the table after my undergrad, in favor of pursuing a graduate degree. I weighed my options and decided that I would rather spend some years in my youth learning how to conduct research -- lessons I believed, and still believe, will carry through into my future endeavors. I picked up an excellent job after my Master's (at the same place I had left behind previously!) and am very happy with how things played out. I realize this is the best possible outcome, but what makes this general arc such a bad idea?
    • thaumasiotes 8y ago
      > I picked up an excellent job after my Master's (at the same place I had left behind previously!) It sounds like you would agree that joining a PhD program is not a good idea.
      • Twisol 8y ago
        It sounds like you have read far, far too much into my message.
    • geezerjay 8y ago
      > What makes this terrible advice? Some PhD programs focus on non-marketable topics that don't help candidates develop marketable skills, and exist only to dump the research group's drudge work on an unsuspecting soul. Wasting years of your life in a low-pay low opportunity dead-end job that's prone to abuse just to pursuit a pipe dream is not a great career move, particularly if the alternative is landing a job at Google.
• gnarbarian 8y ago
  Don't be evil. Oops
  • chasil 8y ago
    If you have to harm someone, is Google the best choice? Have they asked for moral opprobrium? The situation certainly seems like it.
• ronilan 8y ago
  Leah Buechley is the PhD advisor, Regina Dugan is Google ATAP, Joi Ito is Media Lab but... who is the first person speaker of the text? Am I missing something obvious or is it really omitted? Edit: possibly (probably?) https://twitter.com/qijie https://twitter.com/qijie
  • mirimir 8y ago
    Very likely. I can't quite make out the name on her badge. But she's with chibitronics.com it seems. Edit: Doh. It's Jie Qi :)
  • mikekchar 8y ago
    It's very interesting that she is launching the PandaPatents site using her story as the impetus to help people navigate patent law. I haven't had time to look at it, but it sounds like an interesting idea.
    • Bartweiss 8y ago
      I hope this catches on - it looks like there's already a second good story on the HN frontpage, about patent issues with crowdfunding. I'm always impressed at how big a difference it can make to go from "people know this is a problem" to "there's a central place to see what this problem looks like and how much damage it can cause".
      • deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
  • danso 8y ago
    You’re not missing something obvious, like a byline. But the article does contain a screenshot of an email she says she sent to Google, with her name in the From field: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5af0d38a5417fc945678ffd4/t/5c0030af21c67c5d07f457fd/1543516339742/prior+art+books?format=1500w https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5af0d38a5417fc945678f...
  • dao- 8y ago
• CryoLogic 8y ago
  Something very similar happened to me. When I was at university studying CS I was running a Arduino fansite and a fansite for a videogame - both of whom made most of their money from affiliate revenue (a couple hundred bucks per month). I thought it would be cool to work at Reddit (was close to graduating), and I had read blog posts from here and various other sites and IRC about how hiring managers liked projects. I took to it to build a JS library that converted links to affiliate links, for example amazon and some other small retailers I had used. Basically you just parse any URL you embed in the page with this library and it would convert the existing (non-affiliate) links to affiliate links with your signature attached so you got a revenue share. In addition to this, I had done research on Reddit's traffics and crawled reddit to see how many affiliate-capable links existed. I talked about this in the interview and suggested they could make around 2 million per month if they hired me and used my script. --> I was rejected after the interview, but a couple months later Reddit announced it was experimenting with a new feature that would re-write links as affiliate. They ended up implementing this feature that I am 95% sure I came up with and someone else stole. It was one of the shittiest experiences I have ever had interviewing, especially since I didn't get a job out of it but I believe they have made millions off of this idea so far. I huge put off, but I've learned since then backstabbing and stealing ideas is a big part of politics in most corporations. What a bummer.
  • nl 8y ago
    Here's my HN submission of a demo I wrote of something in the same space back in 2010: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1908283 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1908283 It wasn't a new idea then either. The founder of VigLink reached out to me then to share what they were working on.
  • anilgulecha 8y ago
    On the specific idea: The idea is not unique, and really low hanging fruit for a mass site.
    • CryoLogic 8y ago
      At the time, I could not find a single social media site that was using link-rewriting to make affiliate money. Blogs and fan sites for niche products had been using this to make money for a while, social media sites had not yet tried it. The close proximity with the announcement and my interview is what really bothered me. I have a strong feeling (but cannot prove) that someone I interviewed with took the idea and ran with it. I had done a lot of research into how much money Reddit would make off of this and how to implement it at scale without breaking existing affiliate links and such. I had literally planned it as my pitch for what I wanted to work on and why they should hire me.
• Animats 8y ago
  Did you sign Google's visitor agreement? Did you read Google's visitor agreement. You give up some IP rights by signing that. This is a case where it matters. When I visited Google, I refused to sign. They just give you a badge that said you didn't sign.
  • geezerjay 8y ago
    > Did you read Google's visitor agreement. You give up some IP rights by signing that. I guess the "don't be evil" thing is already well down the toilet. What's that all about? A new form of tribute when you're called upon to kiss Google's ring?
    • dimator 8y ago
      I'm pretty sure all companies do similar.
      • geezerjay 8y ago
        > I'm pretty sure all companies do similar. 1) that's false 2) that doesn't make it less evil, let alone acceptable
      • SteveNuts 8y ago
        It might be common in SV but definitely not all.
      • StudentStuff 8y ago
        No, Google would be among a handful of companies to do so. Very few companies in the US have meaningful access control to the workplace, and a tiny portion of them request visitors sign an agreement like the one described at the beginning of this thread. It seems like a power play by Google, akin to how Amazon requests drivers licenses when visiting.
    • neonate 8y ago
      You skipped over the interesting bit: "they just give you a badge that said you didn't sign".
• beautifulfreak 8y ago
  If the author pops in here, I hope he takes a look at this patent, because it might be prior art: https://patents.google.com/patent/US8512151 https://patents.google.com/patent/US8512151 I complained about it to the "Stupid Patent of the Month" attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (here: https://www.eff.org/issues/stupid-patent-month https://www.eff.org/issues/stupid-patent-month) and got a nice response agreeing that it looks obvious.
  • neonate 8y ago
    I think the author is a she.
    • mirimir 8y ago
      True, but I didn't see that she identified herself, or her gender, in the article. So what's a commenter to do? That's an honest question. Mangle to use "they"? Use some genderless pronoun that'll piss off x% of readers?
      • JimDabell 8y ago
        > Mangle to use "they"? Mangle? "They" is perfectly fine to use in this situation, it's not mangling at all.
        • mirimir 8y ago
          In this case, you're right. Or at least, it's what I'd have done. Still, when I learned English, "they" wasn't singular. I guess that it's the norm now, but it still feels odd. And sometimes using it does require mangling. I'd rather have a set of gender-neutral pronouns, but hey.
          • rincebrain 8y ago
            Singular they dates back over 600 years, while the criticism of it dates back only a hundred or two. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
• trhway 8y ago
  The story talks about a patent. The search on the first listed inventor brings 5 of his applications on various aspects of these electronically enriched books all almost simultaneously (after he invented additive manufacturing) - Google I suppose have nice bonuses for patents and skillful patent layers.
• antymon 8y ago
  Similar story and time as Google ANS patent: https://arstechnica.com/features/2018/06/inventor-says-google-is-patenting-work-he-put-in-the-public-domain/ https://arstechnica.com/features/2018/06/inventor-says-googl...
  • rasz 8y ago
    Duda might have won this one https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/08/after-patent-office-rejection-it-time-google-abandon-its-attempt-patent-use-public https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/08/after-patent-office-re...
  • gardaani 8y ago
    It was sad to read the thread where Jarek Duda introduces himself to the WebM codec developers group and suggests using Asymmetric Numeral Systems for VP9 / AV1. Then he notices patent applications about his algorithm and asks Google to help: "Maybe Google could help fighting with it?" It seems that Google helped by patenting it themselves??? So sad. https://groups.google.com/a/webmproject.org/forum/#!topic/codec-devel/idezdUoV1yY https://groups.google.com/a/webmproject.org/forum/#!topic/co...
• nubb 8y ago
  The story in the article about Jill MacKay stealing their LED sticker idea then trying to sell them the patent for $5m is infuriating. Goes to show you can get scammed by some jeweler in Colorado just as fast and easily as by huge Corp like Google. I suppose it's possible she had the idea, saw their kickstarter then submitted a patent to CYA. But then why back the kickstarter? Just feels fishy.
  • philpem 8y ago
    Probably the same reason some major companies (FTSE250/Fortune 500) do the same thing. It's called a "competitor product teardown" - the goal is to identify things your competitors are doing, whether they're patented, and whether you can do the same thing (or something similar) to improve your own product. It's basically the BigCo Inc. version of "that's a great idea, I'm glad I thought of it". (and usually patented it too)
  • MetalGuru 8y ago
    That makes me sick. What a disgusting parasite. And you don’t see anything condemning her actions. I wish that was the first result when you search her filthy name. Would hopefully impact her jewelry business.
• CalChris 8y ago
  Regina Dugan is a former head of DARPA as well as ATAP. She has an impressive resume. Why would she do something like this? For a not particularly important patent, LED popup books? It seems bizarre. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regina_E._Dugan https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regina_E._Dugan
  • rkangel 8y ago
    Julian Assange did culture shifting work with Wikileaks, but allegedly sexually assaulted 2 women. Adrian Peterson is possibly the best running back to ever play in the NFL, but has recently admitted that he still beats his children. Steve Jobs created products that advanced how we use technology in our every day lives by leaps and bounds, but by all accounts was cruel to his daughter. People can achieve amazing, important things in their professional life, but it's no indication that they're good people.
    • dpacmittal 8y ago
      But this is not a matter of personal vs professional life. What she did was on a professional capacity. Not really comparable to all the examples you gave.
  • Bootvis 8y ago
    They thought they could get away with it.
  • rurban 8y ago
    Someone needs to add this incident to her Wikipedia page.
    • kreetx 8y ago
      Not saying it's not Wikipedia material, but perhaps a site nice and searchable site of misdeeds so we won't forget? Does something like this already exist?
      • 8y ago
• zawerf 8y ago
  She worded that way too diplomatically. What google did here is one of the evilest things you can do. They are taking open research and trying to close it off. Research that they didn't even contribute to! Research that they didn't need patent rights for because it's already free for them to use. But they can't allow anyone after them to have the same privilege can they?
  • monochromatic 8y ago
    Maybe. Or maybe the conversation spurred some new idea in the same general field, and that’s what they were trying to patent. This post doesn’t say anything about what the claims were actually directed to.
  • paul7986 8y ago
    Google ATAP did similar to me as I noted above... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18567672 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18567672
  • wnkrshm 8y ago
    How many patents the group or each employee gets awarded per year is probably one of their employee metrics (as in one application per X months). It's not surprising that someone would grab at low hanging fruit or develop unethical methods like that to fulfill performance requirements. It's probably not the first time the group did that.
    • api 8y ago
      "You get what you incentivize..."
  • PurpleBoxDragon 8y ago
    These are just some of the reasons patents are fundamentally broken and the patent system as a whole should be scrapped. Another big issue is that, like most any law, enforcing it costs significant money, and that cost scales depending upon who your opponent is. The cost for a little guy to enforce a patent claim against google is vastly out of proportion to the cost of google to enforce a patent claim against a little guy. This means that the patent system ends up being another form of regulatory capture used to squash competition. If we just removed patents, major corporations would be just as free as today to steal from the little guys, but at least they couldn't then weaponize their patents to crush the original inventors.
• asmithmd1 8y ago
  I believe this was an honest misunderstanding and not an attempt to steal the idea because if the patent had issued and become valuable, it would have been easily invalidated. If a company wants to steal your patent they will "surround" your idea with other patents: method of manufacturing <idea>, method of using <idea> in <industry>, <idea> used in adjacent use case. This is a legal but slimy way to force the sale of your idea since now only they can profitably commercialize it.
  • GenericsMotors 8y ago
    > I believe this was an honest misunderstanding and not an attempt to steal the idea because if the patent had issued and become valuable, it would have been easily invalidated. "Easily", if you have deep pockets to foot all the legal costs. Big companies know this, hence I don't think it was an innocent misunderstanding. The fact that they wouldn't even add OP as an assignee on the patent just reinforces my view that they were acting in bad faith. OP was lucky to catch this before the patent was issued.
    • asmithmd1 8y ago
      There is no way a company would assign a patent they filed. Maybe they would give a low or no cost license to use it
      • GenericsMotors 8y ago
        How generous of them!
• kkarpkkarp 8y ago
  Google is a new patent troll, IMO. Another example: Google trying to patent compression algorithm already dedicated to public domain by its inventor https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/9c7kw6/google_is_trying_to_patent_use_of_a_data/ https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/9c7kw6/google_i...
• lkdjjdjjjdskjd 8y ago
  It could just be people independently working on the same things, as is common in technology.
  • TheDong 8y ago
    For the purpose of a patent, that doesn't help. "Independent creation" is a valid defense for copyright, but not for patents. Something cannot be patented if prior art exists before the filing of the patent. It doesn't matter if you knew about it. Even if you can prove that the prior art is not something you were aware of at the time you filed for a patent, your patent is invalid. That's how patents are supposed to work; inventions must be "non-obvious" to the point where no one else has ever created it nor described it before on the entire planet. If google knows that someone else has created such things (as they must have after said visit), the only responsible thing to do is not file a patent, regardless of if they independently worked on it.
    • Gibbon1 8y ago
      > inventions must be "non-obvious" Friend of mine is an engineer with a law degree that works on patents. What he said was not obvious doesn't really catch what's going on. He said a patent is really a set of answers to a set of questions. The answers are usually obvious when you know what the questions are, but what questions are and why they are significant isn't obvious. That's where the work is.
    • pbhjpbhj 8y ago
      >If google knows that someone else has created such things (as they must have after said visit), the only responsible thing to do is not file a patent, regardless of if they independently worked on it. // A job interview is not a public disclosure and so doesn't count as prior art. So novelty is not affected. However, the applicant must derive rights (employment, assignment) from the inventor in order to apply for a patent. In UK IIRC S.13 of the Patents Act allows an inventor to file to be named as the inventor (or co-inventor) and for the patent to be reassigned accordingly. Of course taking Google to court is going to be a hard slog.
    • 8y ago
• gammateam 8y ago
  > More importantly, sharing work publicly keeps the project can alive and inspires others to continue developing! Which a patent does too, just with a license or 20 years later. It keeps people from reinventing the wheel and gives the disclosure rights even if they didn't have the infrastructure to create or monetize on their own. This isn't one of those nefarious software patents where the whole thing would be obsolete within 5 years, this is LED books, which simply becomes more feasible as transistor sizes shrink and battery technology improves, perfect for a 20 year exclusivity period before falling into the public domain where it can be vastly more practical to create in 2033.
  • olefoo 8y ago
    It does seem odd to stick with an intellectual property system that is so obviously deficient in it's stated purpose of "improving the useful arts and sciences". Current patent law amounts to a barrier to entry for most small potential competitors in any market where defensible IP is required. Big companies can cross-license or litigate around issues but small players are locked out of the markets they might want to compete in because the costs are prohibitive. Yet another example of the American system having failed to protect competition and encouraging cartelisation.
  • TheDong 8y ago
    > [a] patent [keeps thhe project alive] too > perfect for a 20 year exclusivity period So for 20 years, if I wish to create and sell a book with transistors I have to license the idea from google (that is if they're even willing to give me a license)? And somehow having to go through that legal loophole will keep the art of creating LED books alive? You seriously believe that? Does the patent have complex details which would take longer than 20 years for someone to independently discover about creating LED books? If so, people do save time by waiting 20 years and then reading the patent, but that seems extremely unlikely.
    • gammateam 8y ago
      > So for 20 years, if I wish to create and sell a book with transistors I have to license the idea from google (that is if they're even willing to give me a license)? No. Google wasn't supposed to try and patent it. I responded to a very specific piece of the article which seemed to ignore that patent applications functioning as prior art is available to subculture enthusiasts too. The whole concluding paragraph was about making ideas that other people can build from, it wasn't about LED books in general. They want ideas to be available for others to build from but don't want others to patent it, ignoring that attempting to patent it yourself also fixes this, no matter how you actually use the patent or failed/abandoned application. (Although, I'll concede that patenting is an expensive bet that not everyone would have the money or risk tolerance for.)
• lagomorph 8y ago
  I'm not knowledgeable enough to talk about patents and corporations and prior art, but I did want to mention that that tech is really neat. As the parent of young kids, the intersection of storytelling, education and technology is fascinating to me, especially in the era of Youtubers and Netflix and other passive experiences. Kudos for creating something engaging and interesting.
• seshagiric 8y ago
  Not in any supporting this, but likely what happened was: a. some googlers met Leah for casual/interview talk b. Leah describes her ideas in detail c. Said Googlers steal her idea and patent it thinking 2 years is long time d. Leah comes to know and Google is caught with hand in cookie jar This is very Google should have practiced the do no evil. Instead they tried to salvage the situation.
• titanomachy 8y ago
  On a certain level, it makes sense. Google wants to patent it to cover their bases and make sure no one else does the same thing and blocks them. It's a rational move in a shitty game.
  • hajderr 8y ago
    "Rational move". Think about that for a second. Morally wrong doesn't really reach anyone's mind these days.
    • sobani 8y ago
      Morals don't count for a whole lot if a patent trolls are also players in the game.
      • jackvalentine 8y ago
        Morals always count. They wouldn’t be morals if you didn’t have to sometimes to work against rational self interest to stick to them. And google of all companies have the resources to swat away patent lawsuits with so much prior art.
    • seangrant 8y ago
      How would it look if someone else got the patent and completely blocked Google? It's not even a question for large companies. The issue is this archaic patent and copyright system where someone "owns" an idea... Absurd.
      • bsaul 8y ago
        This type of argument doesn’t stand here. Since the truth is that there is prior art, and the right thing to do is to make sure nobody got the patent, google could have make sure nobody get the patent. Ironically that’s what they ended up doing, but i doubt it was on purpose.
      • EugeneOZ 8y ago
        It's not their work for starters.
• rpmcmurphy 8y ago
  I was assigned as an inventor for a bullshit patent application our legal team did not even understand. I did everything I could to undermine it. The whole system is fucked and is all about who has more money for lawyers (who know fuck all about the matters at hand)
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• paul7986 8y ago
  I met/had a similar experience with Google ATAP in 2013 (was Motorala ATAP then; Google recently bought them) though not for a job interview but to discuss working together to build our tech SpeakerBlast into the Moto X. They asked if we ever thought about selling our technology to them before the meeting and at the meeting they baited us for how our tech worked saying we'd like to work with you tell us how it works. Once we did they left the room (Dugan's 2nd right hand man at the time and another) & 3 minutes later showed us the door saying the "race is on." They have since been awarded patents for audio syncing across phones. Many here will say that's just how Silicon Valley works.... takes advantage and stomps on the little guy innovators & their dreams. That's not professional and I met with many other companies like Samsung who acted with the utmost respect & professionalism towards us. Yet, Google whose motto is "Don't Be Evil," can't act in the same fashion?
  • rkangel 8y ago
    This is (one of the reasons) why you sign NDAs before discussing your technology.
    • paul7986 8y ago
      A mutual NDA was signed as seen here https://ryanspahn.com/motorola-google-Expired-NDA2013.pdf https://ryanspahn.com/motorola-google-Expired-NDA2013.pdf. We started SpeakerBlast in March 2013 & were meeting with Google in April 2013. We filed a provisional before the meeting & have a patent in the patent office.
      • bspn 8y ago
        NDAs generally aren't worth the paper they're written on, but holy hell is that one a piece of work. The "residuals" concept basically gives them an open invite to copy anything they like so long as they didn't "intentionally memorize" it. Establishing intent is no easy task.
        • rkangel 8y ago
• perfunctory 8y ago
  Patents must be abolished. Recommended reading: https://www.amazon.com/Against-Intellectual-Monopoly-Michele-Boldrin/dp/0521127262 https://www.amazon.com/Against-Intellectual-Monopoly-Michele...
  • pbhjpbhj 8y ago
    And replaced with? Industrial secrecy doesn't seem like a better system. Perhaps you'd like shorter term patents, or want to fix some other deficit?
    • Joeri 8y ago
      In software it is well known that nobody reads patents who does the actual work in the field. Getting rid of them would not have a meaningful downside in the dissemination of information. Most people in the industry agree software patents are bad for the software industry and they should be abolished. But, if that’s true for software, why isn’t it true for other fields? Simply put: what evidence is there patents are a benefit to society instead of a harm?
      • dboreham 8y ago
        But...drug companies...
      • pbhjpbhj 8y ago
        We don't have software patents (as such! [lol]) in Europe. Software is different, in that source and decompilation exist, you can't really keep it secret.
        • pnw_hazor 8y ago
          EU has software patents. The same applications that are filed and issued in the US get filed and issued in the EU too. Also, there is no such thing as a software patent.
    • PurpleBoxDragon 8y ago
• georgeek 8y ago
  Just a reminder that Google, or any company for that matter, has a fiduciary duty towards their shareholders to file a patent for everything they have learned about and that hasn't been patented yet.
  • kbutler 8y ago
    There's a common myth that companies have "a fiduciary duty" to make as much money as possible (especially short-term), but this has no basis in law in the US. https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/13-354.html https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/13-354.html "modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not do so... a for-profit corporation may take costly pollution-control and energy-conservation measures that go beyond what the law requires. A for-profit corporation that operates facilities in other countries may exceed the requirements of local law regarding working conditions and benefits. " https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-corporations-obligations-to-shareholders/corporations-dont-have-to-maximize-profits https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co... "companies that maximize profits by firing employees, avoiding taxes, selling shoddy products or polluting the environment can harm their shareholders more than helping them."
    • philpem 8y ago
      Thing is, if a CEO doesn't pursue profit and shareholder dividends above all else, they probably won't last long until the investors and board members vote them out.
    • PurpleBoxDragon 8y ago
      >"companies that maximize profits by firing employees, avoiding taxes, selling shoddy products or polluting the environment can harm their shareholders more than helping them." In which case are they really maximizing profits? Wouldn't it depend upon the risk and costs of those options verses their benefits? It's like genetic algorithms that look like they don't work because someone miscalculated exactly what the fitness function was optimizing.
  • 8y ago
• raverbashing 8y ago
  Now interviewing at Google is not only an exercise in futility and alienation, you can also have your ideas stolen as part of it. Good to know
• setquk 8y ago
  It’s down to individuals rather than culture in these things. By purely statistics, an organisation of any size has less than ethical people in it even if they have the best outward impression. Unfortunately these sorts of people tend to favour power and slowly work their way to positions that give them that. Then the whole org is a bad apple. Having been in a similar situation before, the correct answer is “I’ll get my lawyer to contact you with our NDA process” or if you’re really worried “fuck off”. It’s probably better to file patent first though. The patent is what you need to sell them.
  • StudentStuff 8y ago
    Repeated unethical behavior is not the fault of a few bad actors, but of an organization designed to encourage that behavior. I wouldn't discount Google as being at fault seeing as how we already have two instances of Google's ATAP committing patent fraud despite little research and outreach being done. One fun fact I stumbled across is any misconduct when filing for a patent voids the entire patent application, not just the claims that the misconduct occurred in: https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s2016.html https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s2016.html
    • monochromatic 8y ago
      It can also result in attorney discipline.
    • kurthr 8y ago
      Yes, failure to include an inventor of a single claim invalidates the patent family.
      • infinite8s 8y ago
        That's all well and good, but the process of invalidating the patent is long and expensive.
    • heurist 8y ago
      Designing am organization and keeping it running well are incredibly difficult. What you see as encouraging poor behavior could easily be poor management. I have never worked at Google so I do not know.
• blablabla123 8y ago
  Had this already 3 times that interviewers ask me out about their Engineering problems, and how I would solve them. Initially I got good or very good feedback but then afterwards was rejected. It feels weird, also if I consider that they might do this with every person interviewed. Crowdsourcing knowledge through interviews, yay ;) Seems far more appropriate to get toy problems, if that is needed at all, or to get scoped problems but then get reimbursed if it takes several hours.
  • Joeri 8y ago
    I don’t think there’s bad intent here, just a case of the interviewer wanting to offer up a challenge and taking the one that is top of mind.
    • blablabla123 8y ago
      True...
  • chasd00 8y ago
    when i was younger i was interviewing at SomeStartup(tm) in Austin TX. I had a really good conversation with their VP of Engineering, a genuinely nice guy who cared about his people. The last step in the interview was an assignment to write a fairly specific caching system. I hacked on it for a couple hours and got it working per their requirements, demo'd it, handed back the laptop, and everyone liked my work. After that, radio silence. I wonder if I got fooled into solving a problem for them. Granted, that particular problem has been solved a hundred times over so i doubt it. Regardless, i've always wondered what the real story was there. Maybe they were just being polite.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• philpem 8y ago
  There's a subtle-but-sneaky way to play this game. Put in a patent application. Abandon it. Congratulations, your patent is now going to come up in any competent patent examiner's initial search as "potential prior art". Patent the core technology (the "you have to do it this way" stuff), but salt the earth around it so nobody can get a patent on the sub-optimal alternatives. Also leave subtle but important details out of the application. Your conductive ink is silver but has to have, say, palladium added to make it stable? Forget to mention the palladium, and expand the claims to cover mixtures of different metals. See if the examiner allows it.
  • nAwYz 8y ago
    What you describe is the standard in some industries. If a research team discovers something new, lawyers will make a patent out of it that is broad / vague enough to prevent any further research in that area by competitors. At the same time they look at the patents of competitors and if they are too specific they try to patent similar ideas.
    • speedplane 8y ago
      > If a research team discovers something new, lawyers will make a patent out of it that is broad / vague enough to prevent any further research in that area by competitors. Not quite right. If an inventor creates something marginally useful at a large company, there's no question that their lawyers will try to patent it. But the purpose is not to prevent research in the area, in fact the opposite. Once a company has a patent on something, they'd likely encourage further research, knowing that they have a financial interest in the research going to market. All big companies do this, and once the research matures enough to become a product, all the companies have modest claim to it, but they all have an interest to bringing it to market. In some cases, these companies fight who gets what in court (e.g., CRISPR), but in others, they come together and agree on a royalty scheme roughly proportional to their contributions (e.g., MPEG, H.264). The point is, no company patents something to stop research on that thing, it's quite the opposite.
  • pmoriarty 8y ago
    How much does such a strategy cost?
• ilaksh 8y ago
  Its another example of why these types of patents shouldn't even be allowed. There are always a large number of people who don't get credit and/or won't get paid. And then all of the people who have very similar ideas or maybe the same one who get blocked from bringing products to market. If the patent system somehow made it so people like the author of this post would actually make lots of money, that would be different. But it doesn't work that way. There was an application that I worked on. I figured out all of the hard technical problems as the lead developer. Then when the guy got funding he kicked me off of the project, hired his friends, and filed a patent. He was "nice enough" to put my name on it but not as an assignee. Meaning I could never own any of the hard work I did. This is the type of thing that reminds me that the idea that we really even have a civilization is a myth. Everything is just a game where the people who start with the biggest advantages and stoop low enough for the best scams come out on top.
  • monochromatic 8y ago
    Sounds like you signed something assigning your rights to the company.
    • rovr138 8y ago
      If it was a job, it’s usually work for hire and not owned by him but by the company he was working for.
      • itronitron 8y ago
        He would only not have rights to the invention if he signed them over during or after the patent application process. If he was an inventor and not listed on the patent then that invalidates the patent.
  • spiritcat 8y ago
    It's a jungle out there, one of the hard realizations of getting older. Can try not to play along, but then you'll just be more screwed. :/
  • 8y ago
• jules 8y ago
  If your country has "democratic" in the name it's probably not democratic. If your major has "science" in the name it's probably not science. If your company has "don't be evil" in its motto...
  • Waterluvian 8y ago
    Any man who must say, "I am the king" is no true king.
    • m_mueller 8y ago
      Also holds for someone saying "I'm intelligent" and "trust me".
      • mathattack 8y ago
        And “Frankly” and “I’ll be honest”...
        • rodeoclown 8y ago
          I've head this comment before, but from my own speech I don't find this to be true at all. It usually means I'm saying something I perceive to be more vulnerable or direct than any party to the conversation has been to that point - not at all that I was being deceptive before that point or after.
          • InitialLastName 8y ago
            > vulnerable or direct than any party to the conversation has been to that point You seem to be sort of acknowledging the contradiction in this one. If the conversation is guarded (self-protecting vulnerability) or indirect, then it isn't being frank.
            • dcow 8y ago
              But what follows Frankly is genuine whereas in the other examples the target phrase is used to reinforce a deceitful stance.
• DyslexicAtheist 8y ago
  I wonder if a first line of defense could be to license the work as AGPL. Google would then probably not use it AFAIK
  • rasz 8y ago
    Wont prevent them from trying https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/08/after-patent-office-rejection-it-time-google-abandon-its-attempt-patent-use-public https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/08/after-patent-office-re...
• riotta 8y ago
  I and my friends had a similar experience too.
• buboard 8y ago
  Silicon Valley S02E02 Brain Rape https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlwwVuSUUfc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlwwVuSUUfc
• jorangreef 8y ago
  Software patents need to be banned. In the interim, employee incentives (ego, bonuses) to being listed as an "inventor" while BigCompany remains the "assignee" could be ameliorated with a "Software Patent Hall of Shame" (SPHS), which would list software engineers complicit in software patents. This would disincentivize software engineers from stealing ideas, from allowing their work to be patented, or from signing agreements which would force them to do so, since doing so would undermine their prospects with future employers, who believe in free and open software and unencumbered computer science research.
  • jackvalentine 8y ago
    Is this even a software patent?
    • jorangreef 8y ago
      No, but it's Google's love of software patents that is spilling over into everything else, like popup books.
  • monochromatic 8y ago
    This isn’t a software patent. And anyway, lots of methods get patented. If it’s new and nonobvious, why should the fact that it runs on a computer matter?
  • perfunctory 8y ago
    Not just software patents. All patents. What makes software industry so special?
    • da_chicken 8y ago
      Software is also protected by copyright.
      • arfar 8y ago
        Copyright only protects against actual copying. It's quite a limited right in comparison to patents. A patent can prevent others from implementing/selling/making/importing/exploiting the same invention independently created. Copyright pales in comparison to the protection afforded by a patent.
• rockclimber 8y ago
  staying in school is the stupidest idea ever.
• rockclimber 8y ago
  staying in school is the stupidest idea ever. No wonder Google wanted to screw you over
• NicoJuicy 8y ago
  What happened probably, interviewer wanted to credit himselve. A company is made out of humans
• hyperpallium 8y ago
  The intended conclusion isn't explcitly stated, so: private sharing enables this danger; public sharing prevents it, aka publishing.
  • pacala 8y ago
    If only it were that easy. The largest cloud company has a core component of their strategy monetization of open source. I haven’t heard them paying royalties to the people that developed the software.
• acd10j 8y ago
  Any Googler who is willing to comment on this here ?
  • spiderPig 8y ago
    They only show up in threads praising Google as a utopia.
• jackgavigan 8y ago
  IANAL, but 35 U.S. Code § 115 requires that "each individual who is the inventor or a joint inventor of a claimed invention in an application for patent shall execute an oath or declaration" that they believe "himself or herself to be the original inventor or an original joint inventor of a claimed invention in the application," and acknowledging "that any willful false statement made in such declaration or statement is punishable under section 1001 of title 18 by fine or imprisonment of not more than 5 years, or both." So... How is this not literally a crime?
  • hartator 8y ago
    This. Google should also probably take disciplinary actions.
    • 2_listerine_pls 8y ago
      You are kidding right? They even encourage it by making you sign a visitor agreement so that you have no right to the IP you discuss.
      • jacques_chester 8y ago
        Invention is not the same as assignment. You can sign away assignment, but inventorship remains with the inventor(s).
  • teknopaul 8y ago
    Would set a good example now this has come to light and especially since they tried to include the author as inventor. Proves they knew they were not the inventors.
  • 2_listerine_pls 8y ago
    I hope someone makes an example out of them.
  • yread 8y ago
    It is. And since recently there is even case law and supreme court decision for this: https://www.patentdocs.org/2018/10/supreme-court-denies-certiorari-in-regeneron-pharmaceuticals-v-merus-.html https://www.patentdocs.org/2018/10/supreme-court-denies-cert...
• onemoresoop 8y ago
  Here are details of the patents filed: https://patents.justia.com/inventor/ali-javan-javidan https://patents.justia.com/inventor/ali-javan-javidan
• johnalamosisi 8y ago
  Google is evil.
• neil_s 8y ago
  I'm surprised this isn't mentioned, but there are a couple of possibilities here: a) the Google folks listed did actually steal the patent, as described b) the Google folks were working on this already, saw someone in academia that was doing very relevant work, and called them in to see if they'd like to join the team. Not clear how interview went. Unrelated to the interview, the team filed a patent when significant progress was being made. Correlation != causation, so unless there's evidence that the author had a super specific take on electronics in popup books where the probability of someone independently working on the exact same thing is very low, how can we jump to the conclusion that it must be explanation A? Disclaimer: I work at at El Goog, but these views are obviously my own. It's entirely possible that explanation A is the truth in this case, but it seems like people are taking it as a foregone conclusion
  • muraiki 8y ago
    Presumably because Google didn't communicate anything along the lines of "we were already working on this". Even then, there's so much prior art in open research that the patent was invalidated anyway.
  • mtarnovan 8y ago
    So we are really to believe that Google would have offered to include them on the patent application if they would have developed it independently? edit: there are many other stories were Google behaved unethically around patent applications.
• cannedslime 8y ago
  Aside from toxic corporate culture as exposed by James Damore, this is another reason never to associate with "Alphabet Corp" as a professional. Good riddance!
• perfunctory 8y ago
  > “oh there’s way too much prior art” and this patent can’t pass afaiu, US patent office (as opposed to European) is much more relaxed about giving away patents and relies more on courts to settle disputes after the fact. That is an American patent is more likely to be revoked.
• Jnr 8y ago
  Google is also fetching ideas for code and patents from publicly streamed hackathons around the world.
  • rasz 8y ago
    at least they arent murdering people for the code, yet, afaik https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antitrust_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antitrust_(film)
• madengr 8y ago
  +$1k got invention disclosures? Ha, my company pays $150.
• TheForumTroll 8y ago
  So now we are pointing fingers at Google every day? Are they the new Muslims or Russians?
• booleandilemma 8y ago
  It bothers me when there’s no author or timestamp on an article.
  • gumby 8y ago
    See the end of the article, not the top.
    • booleandilemma 8y ago
      She added that, probably in response to my comment and others like it.
• mel919 8y ago
  Let us not forget when Google tried to patent an algorithm for Assymetric Numeral Systems developed by an academic scientist with intent of making it available in a public domain. Seems like this kind of practice is more common with Google than one might think. Here are some articles about that: https://www.inquisitr.com/4935898/google-accused-of-trying-to-patent-work-inventor-created-for-public-to-use-for-free/ https://www.inquisitr.com/4935898/google-accused-of-trying-t... https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/08/after-patent-office-rejection-it-time-google-abandon-its-attempt-patent-use-public https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/08/after-patent-office-re... And a HN link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14751977 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14751977
• luord 8y ago
  This is awfully scummy. I'd seen it in Silicon Valley (the show) and I laughed then; seeing it play out in real life is sobering.
  • kenny87 8y ago
    There was a thread on HN exactly about this last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18488520 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18488520
  • mtarnovan 8y ago
    If you want to understand Silicon Valley, watch "Silicon Valley" - Bill Gates
• djvasi 8y ago
  This is not cool jl;isdif.nvrvu;weo;nsz signed by linkedin.com/in/djordje-vasiljevic
• PaulHoule 8y ago
  Didn't Google try to do this with ANS also?
• JoeAltmaier 8y ago
  I've been named an inventor on several patents. If I read the applications, I hardly recognize the 'art' we invented. Somehow the legalese gets derailed, or they asked somebody else (not me) to help describe it. Anyway, the patent and the idea (software organization) are hardly recognizable as related. Note: I did not instigate the patent process. The company lawyers did. I extricated myself from the process early.
• ripu_daman 8y ago
  Just because you are giant, isn't it!
• iicc 8y ago
  https://www.quora.com/Do-any-companies-give-a-bonus-for-patents-or-trademarks-filed-If-so-how-much/answer/Sumit-Agarwal https://www.quora.com/Do-any-companies-give-a-bonus-for-pate... > Google paid generously for filing patents to help create a defensive portfolio. > ...you would receive $1000 post-tax per person, up to $3k total > I left Google in 2009 and the program may have changed since then. (The events took place in 2014)
• strikelaserclaw 8y ago
  stuff like this makes me so damn angry. It so scummy and is completely against the spirit of innovation and sharing.
• swiftcoder 8y ago
  You may be underestimating the sheer pressure to file patents at big tech firms. Some companies have annual filing quotas, not just for patent attorneys, but also for engineers. Not filing enough patent applications may negatively affect your performance review. I've had patent attorneys show up on a Friday afternoon with a case of beer, to get the entire team to sit in a room and brainstorm patents. Anything goes - doesn't matter if they relate to the field you work in, since the broader company works in almost every field. As an employee, you are specifically forbidden from googling patents, because you might become aware of prior art. As long as you aren't aware... the reasoning goes that it isn't strictly-speaking illegal. I can't say I'm surprised that cultures like that result in the sort of thing you experienced.
• duxup 8y ago
  >An inventor is the one credited with coming up with the idea for an invention. The assignee actually gets the legal rights to the patent. I assumed there was something like that but interesting to see it drawn out.
• butterfi 8y ago
  I'm curious if this idea is that unique -- The Exploratorium published a book called "The Art of Tinkering" in 2014 that has paper circuits that seem very similar to the authors concept.
  • gumby 8y ago
    That's the author's point -- she was working in a field where there was plenty of active work going on, but after meeting with google, the big G tried to patent it.
    • butterfi 8y ago
      Well, if the Exploratorium published a book using paper circuits before Google applied for the patent, is this prior art?
      • gumby 8y ago
        Infuriatingky, it’s pretty hard to use non-patent sources as prior art under the US system!
• _Codemonkeyism 8y ago
  Right from the 80s Microsoft playbook.
• givinguflac 8y ago
  Why anyone can still stand up for Google as a company is beyond me. They are just scum who got a foothold on the internet at the right time.
• jayd16 8y ago
  I'm really not surprised or upset. Its not like Google is known for using patents to crush others. The patent system is fucked up enough that they have to try to patent everything they work on and hope to either get the patent, or as in this case, prove its unpatentable through prior art. Its a fucked up system but I don't think its as sinister people are making it out to be.
• pmarreck 8y ago
  What are the open-source licenses that would prevent someone from patenting my ideas? (or if a shorter list, what are the licenses that wouldn't?)
• greysonp 8y ago
  Google really pushes their employees to patent everything they can. During the brief time I worked there, we had multiple "patent brainstorm" meetings where we'd sit in a room and try to come up with things we could patent based on what we were working on. On top of that, they pay you a decent sum of money (low thousands, forget the exact number) for filing patents. I knew one guy who worked with various teams to file dozens of patents a year and almost doubled his salary. That said, none of the people I knew at Google would blatantly steal other people's ideas. This sounds like a very unethical cluster of employees.
• grappler 8y ago
  Headline says “Company”. Article says “Google”. Is this being softened in Google's favor?
  • dang 8y ago
    I think it's the other way around? I don't know why the article says 'company' but we changed the HN headline to 'Google' after it was posted here last night.
    • grappler 8y ago
      yeah I didn't mean HN was softening it; the article itself was softening it.
• ridgeguy 8y ago
  Can't read the article (in the air, data constrained). But if you have what you think is a patentable invention, file a provisional application before you interview. The USPTO gives you a filing receipt, which might help here. Let your interviewer know you can talk about your invention because you've got a patent pending. It costs $70 to file as a micro entity. See Nolo Press for a good resources on how to do it.
• Squids4Cows 8y ago
  I have often thought... "I have an idea; If I search using Google, and not really find anything relevant, does 'google' ever look at everyones 'ideas' and 'send these off to the labs to investigate further for possible patents? How would you ever know? I'm putting on my tin-hat now!
• cronix 8y ago
  This sort of thing keeps me up at night as we shop for investors for our saas product. They have the money to just implement our ideas and what we show them from our beta, and most of them are in the same general space.
• DonHopkins 8y ago
  30 years ago, I implemented pie menus at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab, and the UMD Office of Technology Liaison wanted me to patent them, but I decided not to, and I don't regret it. The patent would have been assigned to a little patent trolling company that UMD has a parasitic relationship with, and very little of the money would have ever found its way back to me or the University. https://medium.com/@donhopkins/pie-menus-936fed383ff1?source=your_stories_page--------------------------- https://medium.com/@donhopkins/pie-menus-936fed383ff1?source... But that's not the worst problem patenting pie menus would have caused: If I'd patented them, it would have effectively prevented me from using them myself in subsequent proprietary and open source projects, like The NeWS Toolkit, TCL/Tk, The Sims, SimCity, Unity3D, etc. Convincing Sun or Electronic Arts or any other employer or client to license a patented user interface interaction technique instead of using an inferior freely available one would have been a non-starter, as would have been using it in any open source projects. It was only because I didn't file a patent that I was able to freely implement pie menus for NeWS at Sun, and use them in SimCity and The Sims. You're not always going to be working for the same company or attending the same school for the rest of your life, so it's not a good idea to hand over all the rights to your ideas to them, because you'll have to pay if you ever want to use them again yourself. But if you give them away to everyone for free, you get to use them yourself after you leave, and they're free for everyone to use in open source projects. >Open Sourcing SimCity: Chaim Gingold’s “Play Design” PhD Thesis: "Pie menus play a critical role in The Sim’s user interface design, dovetailing perfectly with the object and AI architecture. Objects advertise verbs to character AI, so it is natural for the verbs to be arranged in a radial menu about objects. I can’t imagine an alternate design that would have had the same widespread usability, and therefore appeal, without them. It is difficult to imagine The Sims without pie menus." -Chaim Gingold, Play Design PhD Thesis, Open Sourcing SimCity https://medium.com/@donhopkins/open-sourcing-simcity-58470a275446 https://medium.com/@donhopkins/open-sourcing-simcity-58470a2... Unfortunately other people filed misleading patents around pie menus that should never have been granted, because they tried to retroactively redefine what pie menus were by ignoring published prior art, and coined a new term "marking menu" which they defined by a straw man comparison to their self-servingly gerrymandered misunderstanding of pie menus. So they ended up patenting fictitious "differences" between "marking menus" and "pie menus" that weren't really differences: obvious features pie menus had always had, and that I'd written about and demonstrated in SIGCHI videos, but they'd conveniently ignored, because they needed to trick the patent office into thinking those properties were unique to "marking menus". Then they misleadingly and systematically used those patents as FUD for decades in their marketing brochures, advertisements, and word of mouth from their sales people on trade show floors. They purposefully discouraged other companies like Kinetix and open source projects like Blender from doing anything remotely resembling pie menus, whether or not they actually infringed on their patents. https://medium.com/@donhopkins/pie-menu-fud-and-misconceptions-be8afc49d870 https://medium.com/@donhopkins/pie-menu-fud-and-misconceptio... Huge Problem: Software Patents and FUD Autodesk Advertisement About “Patented Marking Menus”: "Marking Menus. Quickly select commands without looking away from the design. Patented marking menus let you use context-sensitive gestures to select commands." http://images.autodesk.com/adsk/files/aliasdesign10_detail_bro_us.pdf http://images.autodesk.com/adsk/files/aliasdesign10_detail_b... There is a sad history of people using software patents to make misleading claims about obvious techniques that they didn’t originate, and constructing flawed straw man definitions of ersatz pie menus to contrast with their own inventions, to mislead the patent examiners into granting patents. There is a financial and institutional incentive to be lazy about researching and less than honest in reporting and describing prior art, in the hopes that it will slip by the patent examiners, which it very often does. [...] The Alias Marking Menu Patent Discouraged the Open Source Blender Community from Using Pie Menus for Decades Here is another example that of how that long term marketing FUD succeeded in holding back progress: the Blender community was discussing when the marking menu patent would expire, in anticipation of when they might finally be able to use marking menus in blender (even though it has always been fine to use pie menus). As the following discussion shows, there is a lot of purposefully sewn confusion and misunderstanding about the difference between marking menus and pie menus, and what exactly is patented, because of the inconsistent and inaccurate definitions and mistakes in the papers and patents and Alias’s marketing FUD: "Hi. In a recently closed topic regarding pie menus, LiquidApe said that marking menus are a patent of Autodesk, a patent that would expire shortly. The question is: When ? When could marking menus be usable in Blender ? I couldn’t find any info on internet, mabie some of you know."
• nerpderp82 8y ago
  This comes up a bunch and if researchers want to research w/o having people sit on the sidelines and cherry pick obvious extensions to ideas, then you need to basically brainstorm in public and do so aggressively. I would suggest having a weekly or monthly brainstorming session over vide chat, or have a wiki or emailing list with a meadow of ideas. Provide that email list as an immutable publicicly indexed and crawlable content. Put the minutes of those meetings on line, upload the video of the "idea jam sessions" to Youtube, Vimeo, etc. After a small amount of time, you will stake out ownership of enough avenues of research that it will be hard to patent anything. You don't have to build something to patent it, it doesn't even have to be buildable, meaning you can actually patent "problems" instead of solutions. Thoughts?
• alecco 8y ago
  How is this thread at the bottom of the front page with 1535 votes and only 15hs? Google brigade?
• deytempo 8y ago
  If you think they aren’t trying to steal your ideas if you use their products you’re nuts.
• harrumph 8y ago
  Addressing any shock and revulsion following this story: Because capitalist organizations are literally founded upon the act of constant appropriation of the surplus value created by their own employees, it's not reasonable to expect these organizations to somehow indulge a higher standard of treatment toward outside persons who aren't even their employees, to persons who are just dropping by to share ideas and work. Such organizations will seize with both hands whatever of value is presented to them. They seize, that's what they do. All day, every day.
• 75dvtwin 8y ago
  I have heard (so very anecdotal, not confirmed), but similar stories from folks who worked with Google (not for Google). Google would reach to incumbent telephone/infrastructure companies and tell them that they want to use their services for some super project. To get well integrated, Google, of course need to know the details/idiosyncrasy of the existing protocols/work around conventions/etc. So Google employees would receive all the documentation, knowledge/know-how that they could extract. Then the project would get 'cancelled'. And then, some time later, the 'service provider' would find that Google is implementing similar capabilities that their service is providing, only as part of their some other global initiative that aims at converting majority of infrastructure services to Google. Perhaps these stories are a reflection of the internal culture characteristic of the 'Do-more-swindle' company. I see people below recommend NDA/etc. Sure, but US/UK legal system is heavily tilted towards who can hire better lawyers -- and the monopolies win there easily....
• swerveonem 8y ago
  Did the offer any moral or ethics explanation? How did they justify this on a human level? That always interests me about this sort of decision, surely they had many meetings on the topic, what would those minutes look like?
• alexanderwept 8y ago
  Tossing this out - lost the comment this was a reply to: I'm not sure about that - my N=1 I went to a State school and got an economics degree, I started my career as a SQL-lackey for a B.I department in declining midwestern retailer, but I treated my career like graduate school insofar that I worked hard at it. About 4 years after my first day of professional work, I started as a data scientist at a FANG. My team of 9 had 3 Ph.Ds (all science Ph. Ds). As I understood it, the Ph.Ds do receive higher compensation but it's not that much more (~18% higher base) and if I really kick butt, I can out earn them with bonuses. But I think my path was much easier and lucrative. I was able to save ~$100k, I had a standard of living above that of a regular graduate student and I had flexibility that they would dream of. I made 4 years worth of contacts of my profession, I I'm sure some Ph.Ds are worth it as investments, but if you're interested in renumeration, get working.
• patentpandas 8y ago
  Hi Everyone! This is Jie, the author of the original post on patentpandas.org. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and experiences on this thread! I thought it might be helpful for you all to know the full story and give some more context: The original post is actually one of TWO patent-related issues that simultaneously happened to me. The first one was when my crowdfunding campaign backer successfully patented our LED stickers product (https://patentpandas.org/stories/crowdfunding-backer-patented-my-project https://patentpandas.org/stories/crowdfunding-backer-patente...) despite us having a successful crowdfund, lots of press, research papers dating back to 2011 and an entire business by then. And then it was about a month after I found out about the LED stickers patent, I found out that Google ATAP was trying to patent work that I had shared during the job interview (https://patentpandas.org/stories/company-patented-my-idea https://patentpandas.org/stories/company-patented-my-idea). While I can understand why the google story is getting more attention, in many ways it’s actually the other story that’s more problematic, because in that case, the faulty patent application actually passed muster at the USPTO and issued as a patent. This all happened during my last year of grad school at MIT, in the months before I defended my thesis and graduated. And it absolutely sucked! But in the end, I was pretty lucky that both situations turned out okay(ish). The most important bit was that I had support from all these law clinics, and my own giant institution (MIT), to help me navigate. But I can already see from this thread that many others out there aren’t so lucky. The absurdity of these situations, and that they were happening to me at the same time, got me to spend the next couple years learning about patent law at the Berkman Klein Center (https://cyber.harvard.edu https://cyber.harvard.edu). My hope was that I could better understand how the heck all this happened, and to see if I could do something to help other creators out. That’s why I started Patentpandas.org - to have a place to share these patent stories, to help by showing how others navigated their patent problems, and (for folks like my former self) to show that it’s not so scary to work with lawyers and wade into patent law! That’s also why we’re using panda comics to illustrate patent law concepts. Pandas: definitely not scary :) My hope is that if more creators out there better understand patent law and are connected with pro bono lawyers when they need help, then patent trolls and others who have more legal resources at their disposal won’t be able to get away with things like this so easily. BTW, I shared all this during my talk for the Patent Pandas launch last week. In case you’re curious to check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfCYOWVQehA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfCYOWVQehA Thanks, Jie