
Former Google corporate attorney becomes Deputy Director of US Patent Office - jonah
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/12/michelle-lee/
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lukifer
I fall into the camp that believes that patents shouldn't exist at all, but if
we could at least stop granting vague and abusable patents for software and
business processes, I'll take it.

I know nothing about Michelle Lee, but if she spent time at Google, there's no
way she doesn't have some understanding of how bad the patent ecosystem has
become. The only question is whether the bad publicity around patent trolls
has created enough political will to push back against bad patents, given that
granting as many patents as possible is effectively the business model of the
USPTO.

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iamshs
"...given that granting as many patents as possible is effectively the
business model of the USPTO."

and the one that companies exploit a lot knowing they have backlog of cases.
Each case should be examined carefully by the office. See how crowd validation
can come in handy:
[http://patents.stackexchange.com/](http://patents.stackexchange.com/)

I do not know the success rate but they have helped invalidate some patents in
initial stage itself. A similar official and easy to participate program will
be even more helpful.

PS: I would recommend watching the movie "Flash of a genius". It is regarding
invention of time delayed windshield wipers, and how bigger car companies
stole idea from a guy after he pitched them.

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cgs1019
How about "Former Google corporate attorney becomes Deputy Director of US
Patent Office"?

EDIT: (commenting on the article title; not the HN title)

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nostrademons
I had a coworker once who said he'd found a good anti-Hearst-pattern for
Google executives: "Google exec". (A Hearst pattern, for those who aren't
well-versed in information retrieval, is like a linguistic template for IS-A
relationships. For example, if you see the text "<person>, a <thing>, ..." or
"<person> is a <thing>" or "<thing> <person> recently <verb>", you can be
reasonably sure that <person> is a <thing>.) In other words, if the press
reports someone is a Google exec, they are almost certainly not a Google exec.

I've done a few spot checks and this seems to hold up. Andy Rubin, Google's
Android executive until recently, is called an "engineer", "founder", and in
one case "head honcho" in the press. Larry and Sergey are usually called
"founders". Amit Singhal, Google's Search executive, is referred to as
"engineer", "chief", and sometimes "senior vice president". Sundar Pichai is
referred to as "senior vice president" and "head of android and chrome". Vic
Gundotra and Susan Wojcicki each got one mention as "Google exec", but are
much more commonly titled "senior vice president" or "head of social/ads &
commerce".

By contrast, the people who are usually labeled "executives" in the press are
often corporate attorneys, regional marketing managers, or mid-level ops
managers.

~~~
jamesaguilar
I have noticed the same. The time it really stood out to me was that guy who
started the Facebook page for the Egyptian protests a few years back. The
press was reporting him as a "Google executive", but he was actually an
Adwords account executive. I don't know if there is a position further from
exec than someone who manages Adwords accounts for big customers.

~~~
nl
"Executive" is commonly used for any reasonably senior management position.
This is arguably correct.

 _Executive: relating to the job of managing or directing other people in a
company or organizaton_ [1]

Interestingly, for me Googling define:Executive gives the following definition
and example: _a person with senior managerial responsibility in a business.
"account executives"_

(Note that "account executives" are the specific example given).

[1] [http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/executive](http://www.merriam-
webster.com/dictionary/executive)

~~~
jamesaguilar
Right, but my point is that an adwords account exec/manager does not have any
managerial responsibility at all. They would be more properly termed account
technicians or analysts.

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salient
Hopefully she sets up a system so only a tiny fraction of those 600,000
backlogged patents get accepted by USPTO employees, while the others get
discarded as the useless patents that they are. Then USPTO will have time to
pass the patents that really matter, right on schedule, too.

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mathattack
This is a very interesting appointment, and brings about an interesting
question on government appointments. Without knowing anything about Michelle
Lee, my first thought was, "Great, this is someone who actually knows
something about the topic, rather than some political hack!" But then I
switched to, "Didn't I think the same way when banking execs went to jobs in
the Treasury?"

At what point is this industry capturing the regulators that should be
watching them? This was a big enough problem in Japan that they forbid execs
from regulating the industries that they used to work in.

My sense is in this case it's still probably a net positive. Looking only at
her LinkedIn profile, it seems like she was a technologist first, then a
lawyer, then a Google GC. Seems like the right intellectual background. We
will see if she has the political savvy to negotiate a large bureaucracy. For
all of our sake I hope she's able to pull it off!

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proksoup
Abolish intellectual property.

~~~
ori_b
Sounds good. I'll just make a closed source version of the Linux kernel now.

(Copyleft is based around intellectual property.)

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NegativeK
I can't see it ever happening, but a government forcing everyone to distribute
the sources and rights to redistribute/modify along with their works pretty
clearly abolishes intellectual property.

~~~
derefr
As a lesser thought: currently, when you publish a book in the US, you are
legally required to send a copy to the Library of Congress. I could see the
same thing working for software, requiring a submission of source code to some
central publicly-accessible digital library. No licencing requirements beyond
"people can read this," but that'd still be an unearthly boon to, say,
security researchers.

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womenintech
Hopefully this is a sign of good things to come for Tech.

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2close4comfort
Wow, the State Dept and now the USPTO. What parts of government will they
touch next? FCC, DOT, FDA, or Consumer Protection?

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kcbanner
This person formerly worked at Google, not currently.

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2close4comfort
And I am SURE that will not influence any judgement regarding any patent
matters related to Google!

