I work at a large company. A colleague of mine filed a patent for a thing we were working on, and included me in the list of inventors. I spent that summer tra

I work at a large company. A colleague of mine filed a patent for a thing we were working on, and included me in the list of inventors. I spent that summer trading emails with lawyers trying to get the application to even resemble what we were actually doing. The patent was for computer animation, and the application had fucking clip art of printers and pagers and 50 pages of "and this is novel because computers are shiny" and "if you figure out how to do this with a toaster, we've called dibs." I'm proud of the work I was doing; we were legitimately working at the frontier of motion design. It's cool that my name is in the historical record for that, but it's also embarrassing that it's in the form of a software patent - particularly one that looked like it had been copy/pasted from decades of bullshit patents and barely adapted to cover what we were actually proposing. Whatever little faith you have in the patent system will be even further eroded if you ever find yourself on the filing side of the patent. It shocked me how much of the application was broad and hand-wavey, citing irrelevant and obsolete technology to pad out the pages. Even worse, they didn't seem to care to understand the actual "invention." If I didn't fight back, they would have filed (and probably won) something that could have been generated with the prompt "please write me a generic patent application to pad out a tech company's portfolio."