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I was talking to someone who once worked at IBM, and he mentioned that they give a bonus (something like $2000-$5000) for each patent that you receive. He said
by hvs 15y ago
I was talking to someone who once worked at IBM, and he mentioned that they give a bonus (something like $2000-$5000) for each patent that you receive. He said that employees would get together in small groups and take turns filing patents and sharing the proceeds with the group. IBM, of course, paid for all the fees for filing the patent.
Just thought I'd share this random anecdote..
- fortes 15y agoMSFT does something similar as well. Was $500-$1500 while I was there (2002-6)
- wnight 15y agoNo percentage? That's the crime. We talk about the RIAA abusing artists but as MS is showing these patents are worth billions to them. Engineers need to start demanding their worth, at least. If we're going to be DDoSed by patents we might as well enrich someone other than lawyers.
- sdasdasd 15y agoCornell U. pays you 1/3 of the royalty, your department gets 1/3 and rest 1/3 goes to university. No upfront costs to file a patent. I assume other universities also have similar arrangements.
- city41 15y agoAnd the employee gets a nice trophy to display.
- lukesandberg 15y agoGE gave me 500 for getting an application approved for filing and another 500 when/if it gets approved. Also a sweet trophy for every year that i filed something. Getting things approved to be filed was fairly trivial. In fact we would occasionally (about 2 times per year) have meetings in my team where we would spend an entire morning just brainstorming. Then we would take the 'best' ideas and write them up (this included a minimal amount prior art research and about 4 pages of prose and diagrams if you wanted). We would discuss the ideas with patent attorneys who would advise us on whether an idea was worth pursuing. It was a very well supported process.
- windsurfer 15y agoAdobe has the same thing for 1000 to 5000 per patent (though not available to students such as myself). Some people would file 2 or 3 patents a year, usually just pertaining to the particular way they solved a problem that month.
- wnight 15y ago> not available to students Wow. I wonder if they understand the impact of that business decision? Were you unpaid? Or something, that changed your legal status in a relevant way?
- windsurfer 15y agoNo I was paid, it just was explicitly not offered to students or contract workers. I assume it might have to do with intellectual property assignment.