

Ask HN: Is it standard industry practice to be awarded a patent as an employee? - antonius

My brother works at Microsoft and recently one of his projects he worked on with his team got pushed (by senior management) and ultimately accepted as a patent.<p>Is this fairly common in the high-tech industry and do all big companies do this? (Amazon, Apple etc.) Would love to hear some personal feedback&#x2F;stories.
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nostrademons
Yes. I've got 9 patents pending. The patent system is completely broken, but
it's also pretty lucrative for tech employees and the companies that employee
them.

At any large or mid-size high-tech company, there's usually a team of lawyers
whose job it is to evaluate the work the company is doing and file patents on
anything worth protecting. The bar for what can be patented is quite a bit
lower than what most people expect (rounded corners? really Apple?), and so
the general rule of thumb is "If you don't know for sure of someone who did
the same thing, patent it." The onus is on the patent examiner to prove that
the invention is not inventive, and so from the company perspective it is
better to file everything and let the patent office sort out the mess. (Yes,
this is deeply broken. If you care about fixing it, lobby Washington; the tech
industry is just playing the game as the rules stand now.)

Many big companies give out bonuses for patents. These are usually a small
fraction of the value to the company - judging by recent acquisitions,
companies are valuing patents at close to a million dollars each, and a
typical bonus is only a few $K - but they can be a nice source of extra change
for an engineer. I know of people who've scrounged up the down payment for a
house off their patent bonuses, and I once computed that on an hourly basis
for work expended it works out to a few thousand dollars an hour, which is
better than pretty much any other non-passive source of income.

Having patents on your resume is also a very good source of negotiating
leverage when looking for another job. It's an externally-verifiable
demonstration of innovation, which companies will pay much more for than when
they think all you can do is follow orders.

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dalke
I assume you mean that your brother is listed as a co-inventor and that
Microsoft is the owner of the patent right. See
[http://www.yale.edu/ocr/pfg/guidelines/patent/inventor_owner...](http://www.yale.edu/ocr/pfg/guidelines/patent/inventor_owner.html)
for details of the differences.

This has been around for a long time. Indeed, there's a roughly similar story
in Feynman's account titled "I Want My Dollar!":

> What had happened was, during the war, at Los Alamos, there was a very nice
> fella in charge of the patent office for the government, named Captain
> Smith. Smith sent around a notice to everybody that said something like, "We
> in the patent office would like to patent every idea you have for the United
> States government, for which you are working now. Any idea you have on
> nuclear energy or its application that you may think everybody knows about,
> everybody doesn't know about: Just come to my office and tell me the idea."

So Feynman pointed out to Smith there are a bunch of ideas and it's crazy to
tell them all. He gives four examples, and leaves.

> About three months later, Smith calls me in the office and says, "Feynman,
> the submarine has already been taken. But the other three are yours."

> ... Anyway, Smith told me to sign some papers for the three ideas I was
> giving to the government to patent. Now, it's some dopey legal thing, but
> when you give the patent to the government, the document you sign is not a
> legal document unless there's some exchange, so the paper I signed said,
> "For the sum of one dollar, I, Richard P. Feynman, give this idea to the
> government . . ."

The rest of the story is about the $1, and how the other scientists, once they
found how easy it was to get a dollar, started sending patent ideas.

