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> This engineer has filed over 30 successful patents over the past 2 years, and all of these inventions are used in our products. From my limited experience, t
by _cs2017_ 8y ago
> This engineer has filed over 30 successful patents over the past 2 years, and all of these inventions are used in our products.
From my limited experience, typical software patents are either ideas that might (if you're very optimistic) be useful in the future, or descriptions of an approach that everyone already kinda knows. The only purpose they serve is to create a legal weapon to use in patent lawsuits or counter lawsuits. None of the ones I've seen would improve performance or functionality of any product at the time they were written.
Writing 30 patents in two years that actually improved a product seems to me beyond hard. Invented by a single engineer rather than a team, doing it in their spare time, only adds to my degree of disbelief.
Has anyone seen examples of such productivity that you could share? Since all patents are public, an inventor's name would suffice.
- kuroguro 8y agoI don't think it's mentioned anywhere that they are software patents. Might be a hardware engineer.
- _cs2017_ 8y agoThey were searching the engineer's laptop for the code, so I assumed those were software patents. But maybe there's a decent amount of code even in a hardware patent?
- NikkiA 8y agoTo me they were described in a way that I assumed we were talking about process patents, which could be software, hardware, and even just plain ordering of how parts of the process are done.
- JackFr 8y agoMy company just started promoting such a policy, and a guy on the business side mentioned filing a patent for some software I had written. Now the work is subtle and nontrivial, but in terms of its novelty, it might be worthwhile as a lightning talk at a meetup, and I can't see it as patentable. It's all known techniques. Another person at the company assures me that this is very patentable, but maybe I just don't get it.
- dodobirdlord 8y agoThe patent office has historically been willing to give unreasonable patents for computer science innovations. I know of an individual who has a large number of patents that essentially boil down to "Use convolutional neural networks to identify X in medical images". Each time his lab applies the same known techniques to a new domain of medical images, he has successfully filed a patent for it.
- abledon 8y agoWow, stuff like this actually makes me like countries that give a big F-U to medical patents and release drugs to general population for small fraction of original (and highly out of reach for poor people) cost
- xyzzy123 8y agoWhat’s worse is, to some extent you have to do this or else at some point, someone will come along and sue you for doing the obvious thing you’re doing. I used to refuse to file patents. That attitude seems a bit petulant to me now after seeing the company receive some patent threats related to my area of work. Just filing the dumb patent is cheaper than defending, esp for large organisations. I now file bullsh%t patents too :(