I met/had a similar experience with Google ATAP in 2013 (was Motorala ATAP then; Google recently bought them) though not for a job interview but to discuss working together to build our tech SpeakerBlast into the Moto X.
They asked if we ever thought about selling our technology to them before the meeting and at the meeting they baited us for how our tech worked saying we'd like to work with you tell us how it works. Once we did they left the room (Dugan's 2nd right hand man at the time and another) & 3 minutes later showed us the door saying the "race is on."
They have since been awarded patents for audio syncing across phones.
Many here will say that's just how Silicon Valley works.... takes advantage and stomps on the little guy innovators & their dreams. That's not professional and I met with many other companies like Samsung who acted with the utmost respect & professionalism towards us. Yet, Google whose motto is "Don't Be Evil," can't act in the same fashion?
This is a level of douchiness I cannot fathom. What possesses these people to act in this fashion and how do they sleep at night? How is this not seen as clearly unethical behavior? A clear violation of Wheaton's Law, here.
I mean... I could easily take that lollipop from that naïve baby in that baby carriage... but I don't, simply because I'm Not A Dick™.
Did all of Silicon Valley get the wrong takeaway from the Apple/Xerox thing, or something?
Why do people carry out muggings? Because they gain from it. Morality and legality aren't just divergent - they're orthogonal. Just like one can perform moral and immoral actions in physical space, one can perform moral or immoral actions using the legal system. Despite the goal of the legal system being to punish immoral behavior, being able to actually formalize that is up against the limit of complexity - as soon as rules are made to discourage bad behavior, the lawful bad actors move on to using those very laws to carry out attacks.
A major meta problem in the current system is that even when bad behavior is able to be formally judged and is called out, there is still little downside for getting caught. Under a functioning legal system, Google would have to make OP whole for their time/stress/legalfees/etc incurred, and would therefore be discouraged from attacking again. Alas.
The individuals have no problem sleeping at night because there is no shortage of narratives to pick from to justify their actions - then further normalized by their peer group engaging in similar business. Nobody sees themselves as a bad person.
Great comment. Is this a fundamental limit? The justice system itself pricing most people out of justice. A reasonable judge could make the the OP whole, and discourage attacks. But access to that judge is far, far too expensive.
In the absence of a working justice system, are we helpless? Mostly, yes. But Google's reputation will take a big hit here, rightly so. Ideally, the individuals involved at Google would also take a big reputation hit. In an ideal world when they apply for a job, these individuals will be rejected for their immoral, unethical behavior.
>Ideally, the individuals involved at Google would also take a big reputation hit.
Ideally yes, in reality? the problem of a system that rewards trickery and deceit is that eventually the opposite (truth, honor, respect, etc) becomes worthless. You even have countries like mine that are so down this rabbit hole that being called a "good guy" is almost an insult because it just means you're simpleton who gets scammed.
Public reputation is only good in an environment where (public)reputation matters and in this situation the (private)reputation of that google employee within the corporation as a guy who makes money for the company matters more than if a limited portion of the public (us here) knows he outright steals things from other people through deceit. In general the average consumer couldn't care less about the actual individuals behind the products they are using or the controversies behind their creation. The vast, vast majority of computer users don't know that Xerox actually created the GUI and not Apple or Microsoft, and they don't care. So expecting them to provide justice in lieu of the system its a tall order to say the least.
Why do elite decision makers, CEO's, boards of directors, make decisions that will certainly have adverse effects, that will literally kill people (eg. Trafigura), just to make more profit? Despite the fact that they are all already individually multi-millionaires and could not really materially improve their lives with more money?
I've ruminated on this.
I think the only reason that could explain such excess is competitiveness. To them, it is like a game. Its not about getting another yacht, its about beating the other guy. I think its the same mechanism that will drive someone to grind for many hours in an MMO or suchlike.
I've tended to think that a lot of it is about different social circles. If everyone you know makes $50-100k/yr, you feel fine making that yourself, and may not even be sure what you'd do with a million dollars. If your social circle is full of millionaires and multi-millionaries, all of the sudden making a million feels like barely getting by and you think about all of the cool stuff you see people around you getting that you could get if you had tens of millions.
I think it's different past ~$150k salary too (probably more like $200k-$300k in the valley). At that point there's this weird net worth dick measuring contest that becomes a lot of people at that level's xbox gamer score. As in it's this number that they've attached a whole lot of identity to to be able to compare to their peers. It has very little to about what they can actually do with that number and more that they just want a bigger one than their friends.
I think you're right. I also think Trump (ahem) once said something along these lines: "At some point, all this stops being money and is just numbers that you want to keep going up." That would support your competitiveness assertion. (It might also explain why men tend to make more than women, but I digress.)
> I think its the same mechanism that will drive someone to grind for many hours in an MMO or suchlike.
It is greed and a hefty bonus.. and if they have to walk over 50 corpses, it doesn't really matter. There is no point trying to discuss ethics with a snake. Those people have a distorted sense of honor (or not at all).
”For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, for which some have strayed from the faith in their greediness, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.”
I Timothy 6:10
Let's use a different real-world example. An acquaintance shows me an "attic treasure" that I know is worth at least $20k on the open market. Do I offer them $100 and not tell them what it might really be worth? Does it depend on how well I know them?
In my case, even if I did not know the person at all and never expected to interact with them again (basically, the recipe for non-cooperation, according to Axelrod's https://smile.amazon.com/Evolution-Cooperation-Revised-Rober...), I'd offer them about $5k (given some reselling risk and effort on my part, which I believe is worth at least some of the difference). If they were smart then they'd refuse and do their own homework. If they simply wanted to accept the price, they could.
I would NOT offer to take it off their hands for free. "More space in your attic!"
I'm sure that Google didn't owe this woman anything and didn't know her from a hole in the wall but... This is just machiavellian ruthlessness.
Don't be greedy, people. Make mutually-beneficial deals. It's not zero-sum (even though the particulars on how it's possible to not be zero-sum still escape me and hurt my head).
The analogy breaks down, though - in Google's disfavour and in OP's favour.
OP knew that she had something valuable. But she also thought of it as a free good (libre, not gratis). As I interpret it this is because she knew that her work builds on the work of others.
At Google, they probably knew about the intellectual background of OP's innovation, too. And yet, they tried to patent it. So much about their intellectual honesty.
The analogy wasn't really about hot dogs and hamburgers, but about complementarity.
Assume that you have something that has a complementary relationship with something I have, but doesn't have a complementary relationship with anything you have. Assume that I'm in the same situation in relation to you. If we trade objects, we both benefit. Hot dog buns and hamburger buns are designed to be complements of certain respective forms of ground meats, hence the naming scheme.
Eating a hamburger in a hot dog bun would be messier than eating a hot dog in a hamburger bun, so the person with the hamburger and hot dog bun has a stronger incentive to trade.
Well the point is that its nice to see the world how you would like it to be instead of what it is. In practice some people are asshole, egoistical and take pleasure in it and i would argue life tend to reward that kind of behaviour (more money, more power and more girls). And they make fun of you.
Wow that's crazy. I didn't know they did stuff like that.
Also I didn't know Google had patents for syncing audio across phones. I wonder if any of the mobile apps (like AmpMe [1]) have to pay some license fees.
I once spent an evening researching the different apps that could sync audio across multiple devices [2]. I also wanted to build my own app, so tried to see if it would be possible (only if you have a jailbroken phone.) I just wanted to play the same audio on two pairs of AirPods. I found out that the Samsung Galaxy S9 has a Dual Audio feature, and the iPhone X can theoretically support this with Bluetooth 5.0. And the AmpMe app can sync audio across multiple phones. (I was also really surprised to find out that they're a pretty huge company with 20 full time employees.)
> AmpMe app can sync audio across multiple phones. (I was also really surprised to find out that they're a pretty huge company with 20 full time employees.)
The owner is a sketchy guy that made his money using adware (and still is) named Wajam.
I guess AmpMe is what he hope will be his legit way to make money. Until it happens, it's probably bleeding money and is founded by his adware company.
Oh, right! I've heard of Sonos, but I didn't know you could sync up multiple Google Home speakers. Yeah I guess that's probably the main reason for having those patents.
Is that not a fairly simple technology? You're basically measuring latencies (for which there exist very accurate solutions) and accounting for clock drift (again not difficult - USB audio did that many many years ago).
I guess you can get fancy if the devices have microphones but I still think it wouldn't be difficult. Like one man-year worth of work.
Creating a web player that syncs audio across all types of IP devices where you can play, pause, fast forward, seek within a track & more as seen in this video isn’t trivial!
We started SpeakerBlast in March 2013 & were meeting with Google in April 2013. We filed a provisional before the meeting & have a patent in the patent office.
NDAs generally aren't worth the paper they're written on, but holy hell is that one a piece of work. The "residuals" concept basically gives them an open invite to copy anything they like so long as they didn't "intentionally memorize" it. Establishing intent is no easy task.
The one thing that NDAs do extremely well, and the reason that companies like them signed is protect against prior art (the opposite of what we're talking about above). Without an NDA, if you've had a conversation with another company about your tech, then it has become public domain and you can be prevented from patenting. With NDA that problem doesn't exist.
The tech came a long way after meeting them... its now a web app driven by JS that plays, pauses, forwards, rewinds audio in sync as seen in this 2014 video...
In retrospect why on Earth did we ever think a company whose motto was "Don't Be Evil" wouldn't be? It's like meeting someone who introduces themselves with, "Hi I'm John and I am definitely not planning to rape you to death and wear your skin as a mask."
Considering all the other corporate strategies Google employees have taken a public stand on lately, I wouldn't be surprised if there were serious fatigue on both ends - on corporate, for dealing with the constant rebellions killing major revenue sources (ex:- project maven's death being the end of any more government contracts); and for employees, who are likely sick of protesting an endless stream of obviously bad stuff while risking career alienation (ex:- dragonfly).
What's not immediately publicly evident is the opportunity cost vis a vis attrition and new hires - how many people have left from disillusionment? How many prospective employees are actively shunning Google directly because of these policies? (While a number might provide explicit feedback to recruiters about their reasons to reject, it's probable a silent majority is silently avoiding all contacts from Google recruiting.) At least personally speaking, I had a vastly more positive view of google around 2012 when I started grad school (more or less my dream company to work for at the time) than what I had when graduating (sufficient to decline any recruiting requests).
Yes. Season 2, part of the Homicide Energy Drink plot-line. EndFrame lures PP into a meeting, ostensibly to discuss funding, but instead brain rapes[1] PP.
Thank you for sharing your experience and backing up the original post; this is something I will remember should the opportunity to work with anyone associated with ATAP come up.
I'm pretty sure I've seen this on Silicon Valley. Have been telling people who don't work in IT that it's pretty much a document from season one, and they refuse to believe me.
The problem isn't that those claims were lies. I'm sure Google's founders actually intended Google to "not be evil." The problem is that a corporation (or a government, university, church, fraternal organization, you name it) is made up of people. As such things get big they end up being made up of many, many people. Leaders change. Managers change.
When an org gets big some of its people will be assholes because some people are assholes.
Google has been through several CEOs and is a publicly traded company with the latter meaning that it's subject to market pressure and activist investors. It's also a company large enough and relevant enough to be a "national security" interest, making it likely subject to government and intelligence infiltration, pressure, and micromanagement.
No, I'm saying you shouldn't take the words of corporations the same way you take the words of an individual person. A corporation is not even a singular entity. Corporations can't have values because they're composed of a rotating set of minds that may not all hold those values and there is no way of guaranteeing values will be preserved into the future.
Certain actors have been getting away with murder for over a decade now. We have a few lucky first movers that have become alpha predators and are now stifling innovation. I can't really see any rational argument for this type of behavior benefiting our society or market at all - beyond religious adherence to the free market or if Google is working exclusively with your political party (wink wink). Hopefully regulators wake up in the near future - societies that don't protect entrepreneurs won't have any.
Can you point me to the requests to stop? I've seen exactly one, a long time ago. I'm not personally attacking people, and I do contribute here with a positive upvote score. I don't see the issue.
But the main issue is using HN primarily for ideological or political battle. That's directly against the spirit of this site, and destroys it more insidiously than incivility does.
Positive vote scores, alas, aren't an indicator of whether comments are good for HN or not. The most indignant and ideological comments routinely get upvoted. That's one reason they're insidious.
This honestly seems to be an issue with what my personal opinions are about certain topics. I do not "flame bait", I am serious in my positions and don't seek any type of nefarious response. I don't see how pointing out that nobody bats an eye when Google does what China does is "flamebait", it's just an observation. Other links were benign in nature or then sourced as factual right below 'mod' comments.
I'm sure you're serious but that's not the standard here. Nor is it based on opinions. We moderate users with opposing opinions just as heavily.
Flamebait is a matter of effect, not intent, just like tossing lit matches in dry forests. It's our job to prevent flamewarring users from burning this site down, thereby ruining it for the majority who want to use it as intended. The site guidelines distill long experience about what kinds of comments do and don't have that effect.
What google did here is one of the evilest things you can do.
They are taking open research and trying to close it off. Research that they didn't even contribute to! Research that they didn't need patent rights for because it's already free for them to use. But they can't allow anyone after them to have the same privilege can they?
These are just some of the reasons patents are fundamentally broken and the patent system as a whole should be scrapped. Another big issue is that, like most any law, enforcing it costs significant money, and that cost scales depending upon who your opponent is. The cost for a little guy to enforce a patent claim against google is vastly out of proportion to the cost of google to enforce a patent claim against a little guy. This means that the patent system ends up being another form of regulatory capture used to squash competition. If we just removed patents, major corporations would be just as free as today to steal from the little guys, but at least they couldn't then weaponize their patents to crush the original inventors.
Not just patents, but all intellectual property. Copyright is arguably even more broken, lasting a century or more. It's ridiculous. My disdain for the DMCA is immeasurable, and the upcoming EU directive looks even worse.
Not only are these systems broken in their implementation, but there is little evidence that even in their most pure form they accomplished their supposed intention.
How many patents the group or each employee gets awarded per year is probably one of their employee metrics (as in one application per X months). It's not surprising that someone would grab at low hanging fruit or develop unethical methods like that to fulfill performance requirements. It's probably not the first time the group did that.
Maybe. Or maybe the conversation spurred some new idea in the same general field, and that’s what they were trying to patent. This post doesn’t say anything about what the claims were actually directed to.
IANAL, but 35 U.S. Code § 115 requires that "each individual who is the inventor or a joint inventor of a claimed invention in an application for patent shall execute an oath or declaration" that they believe "himself or herself to be the original inventor or an original joint inventor of a claimed invention in the application," and acknowledging "that any willful false statement made in such declaration or statement is punishable under section 1001 of title 18 by fine or imprisonment of not more than 5 years, or both."
Would set a good example now this has come to light and especially since they tried to include the author as inventor. Proves they knew they were not the inventors.
AIUI, the Supreme Court only takes cases that require their ruling to clarify interpretations of existing law or a lower correct incorrectly interpreted a law. Denying cert means their is no clarification to be made to existing law, so that in itself is an answer.
Let us not forget when Google tried to patent an algorithm for Assymetric Numeral Systems developed by an academic scientist with intent of making it available in a public domain. Seems like this kind of practice is more common with Google than one might think.
Did you sign Google's visitor agreement? Did you read Google's visitor agreement. You give up some IP rights by signing that. This is a case where it matters. When I visited Google, I refused to sign. They just give you a badge that said you didn't sign.
But different companies use different forms of visitor NDA — and lawyers purely love to load up contract forms with "protective" language to show how knowledgeable they are. This can be dangerous to counterparties; Stanford, in effect, lost part-ownership of a patent for HIV diagnostic testing because a Stanford investigator signed a visitor NDA that included IP-assignment language [0]. The case went all the way to the (U.S.) Supreme Court (about a tangential statutory issue).
The lesson: Always RTFA before signing it (where the A stands for the agreement), because sadly there's no such thing as an accepted, named standard.
Your comment is incredibly misleading. This wasn't the "you came by our office for lunch" NDA. This was the "you worked here for a while, and we trained you and taught you our techniques, which you later used in an invention" NDA.
> This wasn't the "you came by our office for lunch" NDA. This was the "you worked here for a while, and we trained you and taught you our techniques, which you later used in an invention" NDA.
Citation for the first assertion? Here's an excerpt from the Supreme Court's summary of the facts: One Dr. Mark Holodniy [0], who had recently joined a Stanford lab as a fellow, "signed a Visitor's Confidentiality Agreement (VCA). That agreement stated that Holodniy "will assign and do[es] hereby assign" to Cetus [predecessor to Roche] his "right, title and interest in each of the ideas, inventions and improvements" made "as a consequence of [his] access" to Cetus." [1] The trial court's opinion [2] states that Holodniy signed the VCA "[a]t the time he began working at Cetus"; it wouldn't be the least bit surprising if he did so without first getting the VCA reviewed by the Stanford legal department, because after all it's just an NDA, right?
Yes, the Stanford fellow worked at Cetus for nine months learning various techniques — which were published — and, months later, used (at least some of) the techniques when working with his Stanford colleagues.
The point is that a relatively-junior Stanford employee — as a result of having signed another organization's "Visitor Confidentiality Agreement" — in effect gave the other organization a get-out-of-jail-free card: The other organization was allowed to infringe Stanford's patent on a later invention by other Stanford investigators because the junior employee's own contribution to that invention qualified as a "consequence" of the employee's previous training at the other organization.
> Your comment is incredibly misleading.
You're entitled to your opinion, of course. The lesson is still valid: RTFA before you sign it — because otherwise you might be giving away valuable rights months or years down the road.
You're making it sound like he just popped in one day and had a sandwich and a chat with the people working there. Your own citation, though, is to "the time he began working at Cetus". The "visitor" NDA there is more like "visit" in the sense of "visiting professor" -- someone who will be there for an extended time, working alongside the other people there.
And your original link to Wikipedia's summary says:
The Stanford lab in which Holodniy worked had been working on developing better HIV tests, and wanted to try the new PCR method, so Holodniy's supervisor had arranged for him to work at Cetus to learn the technique ... [a]fter completing his training at Cetus, Holodniy then returned to Stanford where he and other Stanford employees tested the HIV measurement technique.
If you work somewhere for a while and they give you training in the stuff they do, they're going to want you to keep that confidential and probably want to make claims on anything you develop as a result of what they taught you. You are heavily misrepresenting the word "visitor" to make it sound like he was only there for an office tour or something.
- You're arguing that it was meet and right for Cetus to claim ownership of anything that the Stanford fellow did, presumably ad infinitum, as long as it was a "consequence" of the training that Cetus provided to the Stanford fellow. While I think that's a pretty aggressive position, I really don't care, because it's a business decision for each party to make.
- In contrast, I am suggesting that the Stanford fellow probably didn't realize the consequences of his signing a so-called confidentiality agreement, and that the lesson is to RTFA, not to assume that the agreement is limited by what its title says.
You're arguing that it was meet and right for Cetus to claim ownership
No, I'm claiming that it should not have been surprising that the agreement for someone who worked there included such claims. How I personally feel about it is irrelevant; it's a standard practice, and to be expected.
What I am arguing with is your repeated use of terms like "visitor", to make it sound like the guy just popped in for lunch one day and they claimed all his work. He worked there. They trained and taught him. While there are contexts in which "visitor" can be the appropriate term for that (again, see "visiting professor"), the usual connotation of "visitor" is incredibly misleading here, and I wish you'd be more clear about it.
> What I am arguing with is your repeated use of terms like "visitor", to make it sound like the guy just popped in for lunch one day and they claimed all his work. ... the usual connotation of "visitor" is incredibly misleading here, and I wish you'd be more clear about it.
"Visitor's Confidentiality Agreement" was the title of the NDA, for Pete's sake; that's what makes it sound as though the guy popped in for a meeting.
And the trial court's opinion says that the Stanford fellow "commut[ed] daily" to Cetus. This seems to suggest strongly that the fellow divided his time between Stanford and Cetus — in effect, that the guy was a daily visitor to Cetus, as opposed to being seconded to Cetus.
Again, the point: RTFA — because hindsight opinions might differ about what you should or shouldn't have expected.
So he worked there, and commuted to work there, because of how he worked there.
And you brought this up in a thread about something not even close to the same situation, yet presented it as relevant. And doubled down despite being contradicted by your own sources. He worked there. He knew he worked there. He was not just popping in for half an hour that one time to have lunch with them. He worked there and they trained him on their techniques while he worked there. The fact that the word "visitor" was in there is not relevant and does not make it be the same situation that this thread was about. It is not the same situation. It is not a similar situation. It is not the same situation because -- have I mentioned this? -- he worked there.
No, Google would be among a handful of companies to do so. Very few companies in the US have meaningful access control to the workplace, and a tiny portion of them request visitors sign an agreement like the one described at the beginning of this thread. It seems like a power play by Google, akin to how Amazon requests drivers licenses when visiting.
Its another example of why these types of patents shouldn't even be allowed. There are always a large number of people who don't get credit and/or won't get paid. And then all of the people who have very similar ideas or maybe the same one who get blocked from bringing products to market.
If the patent system somehow made it so people like the author of this post would actually make lots of money, that would be different. But it doesn't work that way.
There was an application that I worked on. I figured out all of the hard technical problems as the lead developer. Then when the guy got funding he kicked me off of the project, hired his friends, and filed a patent. He was "nice enough" to put my name on it but not as an assignee. Meaning I could never own any of the hard work I did.
This is the type of thing that reminds me that the idea that we really even have a civilization is a myth. Everything is just a game where the people who start with the biggest advantages and stoop low enough for the best scams come out on top.
Patent law includes a provision for situations like this - it’s called “derivation,” meaning basically that someone stole another person’s work and tried to patent it. The rightful inventor can initiate a proceeding at the patent office to invalidate the patent and get control of the work.
If you add enough bling to an existing idea, you can patent that, if the bling you add is an obvious and probably necessary path forward, you can still steel ideas from the public domain.
He would only not have rights to the invention if he signed them over during or after the patent application process. If he was an inventor and not listed on the patent then that invalidates the patent.
Regina Dugan is a former head of DARPA as well as ATAP. She has an impressive resume. Why would she do something like this? For a not particularly important patent, LED popup books? It seems bizarre.
The good news is that very few people are at the top. Most are in the middle, and it's entirely possible to be ethical and in a good middling position.
How can you justify your work in the middle as ethical, if it directly supports a rotten apple at the top? Your life's work turned into a support system for a beast, wonderful!
I suppose it depends how you view the system and the rotten apple.
A properly functioning complex system should be able to tolerate a few bad apples, limiting the harm that they can cause. If you work in such a system and there are bad apples, you can justify the ethics of your work if there are checks and balances that limit the leader's ability to harm.
The obvious analogy is the current U.S. political system. It's quite possible to see the United States as generally striving for a more fair society, and generally good, and yet to be disgusted by Trump's cruelty and inept. The only way to square those two competing ideas is to acknowledge that even though Trump is a miserable rotten apple, he doesn't really have all the power. As bad as he is, he won't last forever, and the principals of the U.S. will long survive him.
The psychopaths at the top are a lucky minority of a mass of psychopaths, most of which prosper a bit less at middle levels in organizations. Only low-functioning psychopaths are exposed and thrown out, and usually only by chance because of specific incidents.
No way. The psychopaths at the top of the top are a different breed, by an order of magnitude. It takes a different "type" of person to run for U.S. President than to run a large organization or company. Consider the president of GM, who worked her way up over 30 years from bottom to top and had to learn everything in between. Compare that to either Trump, who basically staged his election as reality TV episode that went wrong (he just wanted ratings, not to run the place). Also consider Obama, who was so smart, well spoken, and charismatic, probably only heard people telling him would be president from 18 onwards. Also Ted Cruz, who would happily accept a role of enforcement of the "US Moral Compass" as his pre-ordained right/duty.
My point is that there are plenty of folks at the top of their company that are not physcopaths, they inched their way up over decades of sweat and tears, and even if they aspired to lead on their way up, they knew they had to prove themselves in every aspect of the business first. CEOs of GM and Merck are decent examples. Then there are folks who believe they were chosen for the job before their birth. I'm scared of them.
Also, you don’t get to be the head of an organization whose primary goal is to figure out better and more efficient ways of mass murdering people whilst having any semblance of a moral compass, either.
It does increasingly feel this way, but I think (hope?) it's selection bias. In other words we hear about the psychopaths because they are newsworthy. We don't generally hear about the average CEO, because they are average and generally follow expected social norms.
Sorry but I don't share that hope, it doesn't make logical sense. The higher you go in organizational pyramid, and the bigger the pyramid is (in width and amount of levels), the harder it gets to progress. Sure, you can impress here and there with your raw technical/managerial skills, but sooner or later that won't get you much further. That's where backstabbing, alliances, quid pro quo, slanders happen. It comes about how you look to those important, not actual results. Good hearted balanced individual could theoretically survive, but constant battle with those skilled in these games would wear them down over time.
Politics on the other hand works almost always, the person just needs to be apprehensive and adapt to whom they try to please. Its not limited to corporations, plain old state politics and bureaucracy is the same.
Btw minor nitpick - I would expect much more sociopaths than proper psychopaths in top of the pyramid.
Minor nitpick with your nitpick - the DSM used to make a distinction between Sociopathy and Psychopathy, but as of DSM 5, they are both described under the umbrella of Antisocial Personality Disorders (ASPD). The distinctions now are only cultural, and made outside the DSM - usually by researchers trying to explain ASPD traits in nature vs. nurture constructs. In that regard, one could say there's actually no distinction between the traits describing the two as defined in DSM 5.
Reminds me that anecdote, not sure who it was, he was wondering where are the Caesars or the Hitlers of our time, all that brand of ambitious, manipulative and dominant personalities. The answer, he found, was that nowadays those people are absorbed into corporate instead of going into politics.
Disclaimer: I am a Google employee, who isn't listed as inventor on any patents here. I don't speak for Google and all the usual blah blah.
In my experience outside of Google, typically how this works is that you will get a visit from product counsel asking if you have any patent-able work. It's not your job to ask if it's novel enough; that's the patent lawyers job.
So they bug you for months while you are trying to get work done asking about what you are working on and how it works, and then file something on your behalf. I can't recall if I even needed to sign anything before a provisional application was filed.
The way that this is pitched is that it's a necessary evil. One needs a huge patent portfolio to protect your tech inventions, because when you are sued, you can leverage your portfolio to protect yourself. I hate this system and how it works, but it is a business reality.
I don't know Regina, but I think Hanlon's razor applies. It less likely that she woke up one day and said, "well, I want to steal other people's inventions today!", than, "oh I have a bunch of work to do and need to get counsel off my back."
It doesn't make what happened here right, but I think it's unfair to assume malice.
>"I have a bunch of work to do and need to get counsel off my back"
You would have had a hell of a lot more work to do if you'd actually come up with the ideas you patented yourself, instead of stealing somebody else's bunch of work they did.
>It doesn't make what happened here right, but I think it's unfair to assume malice.
I'll probably burn some Hacker News points here but the old adage needs to be updated.
Never attribute to stupidity or malice what can be attributed to both stupidity and malice.
The same Wikipedia article that mentions a Wired article of potential conflict of interest when working for the US goverment and awarding a contract for a company she owned stock in. Totally sounds like a non-corrupt human.
As a result of many real world experiences I've started to see ridiculously impressive looking resumes as a contrarian indicator.
When I see a resume that cites multiple company foundings, dozens of patents, dozens of projects, etc. I know the person is either stealing or taking credit for others work or just padding their resume in the more conventional sense. It says this person is a liar, exaggerator, narcissist, or sociopath.
It's simply not physically possible for a human being to do the amount of stuff I see on some resumes/CVs. There are not enough hours in a day to actually invent (as in actually conceptualize, research, and prove) a hundred things in 20 years or found (as in actually shepherd to success) dozens of companies. Founding one successful company takes several years and a ridiculous amount of work. Founding two or three in a life time is possible but off the charts impressive and the number of people who can realistically claim this are few. Dozens? Physically impossible, but I've seen such things claimed... by people whom I later saw were total liars and sociopaths.
Edit: it's different if they accurately claim to have managed people who have done these things, like "managed a research organization with over 200 patents and 1000 publications" or "founded company X and also contributed as an advisor to companies Y and Z" etc. It's also important to note authorship positions in long lists of publications since some science teams add everyone who ever touched a project as an author. Being listed on a bunch of publications with 15 authors is not a contrarian indicator, but claiming to be a primary researcher on absurd numbers of things can be.
Well said! The old adage; "if something seems too good to be true; it probably is" is a truism. The outliers are very few. The Internet is used to amplify every small exaggeration and falsehood into banner headlines and for some reason even sane people default to believing them. Being sceptical takes effort while belief is wired into our DNA.
Not saying it's not Wikipedia material, but perhaps a site nice and searchable site of misdeeds so we won't forget? Does something like this already exist?
On one hand I’ve long thought this would be a good thing to have after seeing how often people can prey on others repeatedly but on the other I’ve realized that some people can and do change. The fuzziness of our memories over time let’s us heal and gives others a second chance. I’ve also learned over the years that things that are designed to catch or punish bad actors will instead be used by the very people they’re meant to punish to go after their enemies. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
I think the argument was that he did precisely that. Yet history paints him as a great inventor (he was, and filed a lot of patents), and most people likely think of him as a "good/nice guy" which he may or may not have been.
Electrocuting dogs, cats, horses, and even an elephant, says a lot more about you as a human being than the person you're trying to discredit by electrocuting dogs, cats, horses, and even an elephant.
"The war of the currents (sometimes called battle of the currents) was a series of events surrounding the introduction of competing electric power transmission systems in the late 1880s and early 1890s." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_currents
Electrocuting an Elephant seems to have occurred a decade after the war of currents January 17, 1903.
So he had even less justification for electrocuting the elephant than trying to discredit Tesla, and he was even older and should have known better. That makes him an even worse human being in my book. Don't fuck with elephants!
I assume that statement has less to do with good behavior and more to do with doing something that can bite you in the ass when you have so much to lose.
Julian Assange did culture shifting work with Wikileaks, but allegedly sexually assaulted 2 women.
Adrian Peterson is possibly the best running back to ever play in the NFL, but has recently admitted that he still beats his children.
Steve Jobs created products that advanced how we use technology in our every day lives by leaps and bounds, but by all accounts was cruel to his daughter.
People can achieve amazing, important things in their professional life, but it's no indication that they're good people.
But this is not a matter of personal vs professional life. What she did was on a professional capacity. Not really comparable to all the examples you gave.
That's hilarious. 3 months is far too short of a time to actually invent anything meaningful and get far enough along with it to determine whether it would actually be worth patenting.
It’s down to individuals rather than culture in these things. By purely statistics, an organisation of any size has less than ethical people in it even if they have the best outward impression. Unfortunately these sorts of people tend to favour power and slowly work their way to positions that give them that. Then the whole org is a bad apple.
Having been in a similar situation before, the correct answer is “I’ll get my lawyer to contact you with our NDA process” or if you’re really worried “fuck off”.
It’s probably better to file patent first though. The patent is what you need to sell them.
Repeated unethical behavior is not the fault of a few bad actors, but of an organization designed to encourage that behavior. I wouldn't discount Google as being at fault seeing as how we already have two instances of Google's ATAP committing patent fraud despite little research and outreach being done.
One fun fact I stumbled across is any misconduct when filing for a patent voids the entire patent application, not just the claims that the misconduct occurred in: https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s2016.html
Assholes hire assholes. Eventually the assholes all float to the top and make asshole decisions. You can't win. This is a failure mode of every organisation I have ever seen.
My take on it is as long as there are instruments to abuse there will be unethical people to do so. Patent law and drug prohibition are equivalent, to me, in this way. They create unnatural economic sectors where unethical behavior is favored.
They give a legal framework for unethical people to prosper. They are "hacking" the system. Highly moral societies are especially ripe for this kind of victimization because many of the "laws" are social norms that everyone just follows.
Designing am organization and keeping it running well are incredibly difficult. What you see as encouraging poor behavior could easily be poor management. I have never worked at Google so I do not know.
Culture is created by individuals. But the fact that Google gives large bonuses to employees for giving their patent lawyers topics to pursue is a huge incentive for unethical behavior like described in these anecdotes.
As for the rest of your argument, there’s a big gap between the people who love to share ideas and tech and the people who want to monetize every drop of IP. I think it would take a pretty twisted or cynical mind to even think of patenting something like an electronics-integrated storybook. This is not a remotely new idea (story/picture books with embedded electronics have been around for decades), and there’s no fundamental innovation at the root of these patents. This is just the worst impulses of VC culture out of control.
The bonuses are actually not that large. The real motivation is to have patents to put into your promo packet to help you the next time you apply for promotion.
I had 2 patents issued when I was at Google. As best as I can recall, the bonus for first one was nice ($5K?), and then the second was much smaller ($1K). I'm not sure how far the reward decays (I do not recall if it reaches zero). I remember thinking at the time that the Google patent bonuses were much smaller than patent bonuses at other companies, as a friend at Red Hat was making a killing via patent bonuses.
$5K is large for a US company IMHO, but I don't work in CA. It's still a tiny incentive and peanuts compared to how much the lawyer and the PTO get paid for your patent. You know why they pay you? Two reasons. One is as an incentive - people get all excited about little 1K bonuses. The other is that they are effectively "buying" your idea. That whole bit about the assignee? Yeah, no. In the US, the inventor is legally the "owner" of the patent (IANAL so wording...). They have to give you something in return for it. The monetary award and the associated documentation is to prove you made a fair exchange.
My understanding (again IANAL) is that even if you sign documents with your company agreeing that they own all your innovation while employed, you are still legally the assignee for your patents. If you run off and patent something while employed and don't sign over a patent they want, you will be in breach of whatever contract/document you signed, but until any conflict is resolved it's not their patent until you assign it to them.
Accepting the "patent bonus" is a way of having you confirm the transfer of your IP to them. It legally finalizes the deal you made when you hired in and signed that bullshit IP document. From their side it's a tiny price to pay for that.
I'm sure a real lawyer can iron out the details I didn't get right in the above.
Well, the first bonus was large. I think the idea was to give you an incentive to try it, and get you used to the system. After that, the benefits decreased. I think that after several patents, the bonus dwindled to (almost) nothing.
> It’s down to individuals rather than culture in these things. By purely statistics, an organisation of any size has less than ethical people in it even if they have the best outward impression.
How the organisations react to that bad apples is what matters. I have seen companies ruined by half a dozen people that bully others, play office politics and blame games. Most of the people were fantastic, but the CEO will do nothing about this bullies in high positions.
If a company has no way of dealing with these people, the company does not deserve to survive. So, yes there are bad apples. But, the companies have the tools to make them correct their behaviour or get rid of them.
> It’s probably better to file patent first though.
Yes. Completely agree. Companies should play nice, but you should protect yourself just in case.
Interestingly enough in the hierarchy of power in that context, MIT has more than Google.
MIT is free standing when it comes to their finances. They have a $16.4 billion endowment. So Google (etc) doesn't have economic leverage over them, such that MIT always needs money and can't afford to ever cross large organizations.
If you get three or four of the better schools together in the conflict, Google would beg forgiveness. They desperately need access to the best those schools have to offer, and they know it. That access and relationship is worth more than gold or pride to them. Money? They've got so much they have no idea what to do with it. Get cut out of critical relationships with elite schools and that can take enough of your edge away over time that you start losing in subsequent competitive rounds of don't be killed by tech inflection.
The fact that a $16.4B endowment exists doesn't mean that any of it is available to fight a pissing match with Google (whose market cap is still ~45-50x MIT's endowment) - in my experience at a similar institution, I was told "we have $X in endowments, but all of it is essentially already spent" - it had been earmarked for various projects 5+ years in advance.
There were no secrets here. This was work, which was publicly published and promoted, which a third party then tried to not only plagiarize but also to lock others out of using.
I'm from a scientific background. Plaigarism is the most serious allegation you can level against someone. This is a whole 'nother level.
If you want to protect your secrets, you should patent them so when someone figures out your secret, or in this case your creative idea, you have a leg to stand on. Otherwise, they figure out your secret or idea and you have nothing. This is the entire purpose of patents and, despite many of the current issues with patents, they are still effective in many cases.
While you can argue patents are only paper, a valuable patent is worth defending. In this case, she was able to demonstrate prior art, meaning that a patent could not be granted since they have no idea to protect since it's been in the public domain (i.e. released to the world) and not an original/non-trivial idea. This is why academic publication, or in the past the use of laboratory journals, are useful in documenting time of the invention.
The patent system is just a mechanism that uses the threat of state violence to prop up the idea that an idea is property that can be owned. This concept is false, and the sooner people abandon that model the better off we will all be. The state can’t use the threat of violence to make pi equal to 3, to make a public domain codec a “google invention”, nor to deed title to the number two. Remember, parents are just an industrial incentive mechanism propped up by cops, nothing more.
What stops other people from taking your tangible property other than the threat of state action?
Sure, there are plenty of people who would refrain from stealing anyway just because it’s morally wrong. But there are enough people who don’t care that the whole idea of property rights becomes meaningless in practice without some way of enforcing them.
> What stops other people from taking your tangible property other than the threat of state action?
Aside from morals, the threat of reciprocation, not by the state specifically but by the property owner who was harmed and anyone authorized to act on their behalf.
Unlike actual property, IP isn't based on reciprocation. The penalties for infringement go way beyond simply losing similar forms of IP.
That would simply be murder, not a just or reasonable response to someone stealing your TV. In any case it still doesn't involve any state action, so we appear to be in violent agreement that, contrary to your original assertion, the state is not the only thing stopping other people from taking your property.
There is a big difference between open research that you don't want Google to lock away behind a patent and 'secrets'. Her ideas weren't secret, she just didn't want Google to own the patent to it.
The story in the article about Jill MacKay stealing their LED sticker idea then trying to sell them the patent for $5m is infuriating. Goes to show you can get scammed by some jeweler in Colorado just as fast and easily as by huge Corp like Google.
I suppose it's possible she had the idea, saw their kickstarter then submitted a patent to CYA. But then why back the kickstarter? Just feels fishy.
Probably the same reason some major companies (FTSE250/Fortune 500) do the same thing. It's called a "competitor product teardown" - the goal is to identify things your competitors are doing, whether they're patented, and whether you can do the same thing (or something similar) to improve your own product.
It's basically the BigCo Inc. version of "that's a great idea, I'm glad I thought of it". (and usually patented it too)
That makes me sick. What a disgusting parasite. And you don’t see anything condemning her actions. I wish that was the first result when you search her filthy name. Would hopefully impact her jewelry business.
It was sad to read the thread where Jarek Duda introduces himself to the WebM codec developers group and suggests using Asymmetric Numeral Systems for VP9 / AV1.
Then he notices patent applications about his algorithm and asks Google to help: "Maybe Google could help fighting with it?"
It seems that Google helped by patenting it themselves??? So sad.
I'm surprised this isn't mentioned, but there are a couple of possibilities here:
a) the Google folks listed did actually steal the patent, as described
b) the Google folks were working on this already, saw someone in academia that was doing very relevant work, and called them in to see if they'd like to join the team. Not clear how interview went. Unrelated to the interview, the team filed a patent when significant progress was being made.
Correlation != causation, so unless there's evidence that the author had a super specific take on electronics in popup books where the probability of someone independently working on the exact same thing is very low, how can we jump to the conclusion that it must be explanation A?
Disclaimer: I work at at El Goog, but these views are obviously my own. It's entirely possible that explanation A is the truth in this case, but it seems like people are taking it as a foregone conclusion
Presumably because Google didn't communicate anything along the lines of "we were already working on this". Even then, there's so much prior art in open research that the patent was invalidated anyway.
In the interim, employee incentives (ego, bonuses) to being listed as an "inventor" while BigCompany remains the "assignee" could be ameliorated with a "Software Patent Hall of Shame" (SPHS), which would list software engineers complicit in software patents.
This would disincentivize software engineers from stealing ideas, from allowing their work to be patented, or from signing agreements which would force them to do so, since doing so would undermine their prospects with future employers, who believe in free and open software and unencumbered computer science research.
Copyright only protects against actual copying. It's quite a limited right in comparison to patents. A patent can prevent others from implementing/selling/making/importing/exploiting the same invention independently created.
Copyright pales in comparison to the protection afforded by a patent.
First place I worked for had something like that except it was a supposed new customer that took their technical sales documentation and gave them to a competitor to develop a competing system. They also sent two of the competitors engineers to training sessions.
I've been named an inventor on several patents. If I read the applications, I hardly recognize the 'art' we invented. Somehow the legalese gets derailed, or they asked somebody else (not me) to help describe it. Anyway, the patent and the idea (software organization) are hardly recognizable as related.
Note: I did not instigate the patent process. The company lawyers did. I extricated myself from the process early.
In software it is well known that nobody reads patents who does the actual work in the field. Getting rid of them would not have a meaningful downside in the dissemination of information. Most people in the industry agree software patents are bad for the software industry and they should be abolished.
But, if that’s true for software, why isn’t it true for other fields? Simply put: what evidence is there patents are a benefit to society instead of a harm?
Nothing. Industry secrets is a far better model than giving major corporations access to government power that they can use to crush smaller competition, sometimes for work that they stole from the smaller competition.
You may be underestimating the sheer pressure to file patents at big tech firms. Some companies have annual filing quotas, not just for patent attorneys, but also for engineers. Not filing enough patent applications may negatively affect your performance review.
I've had patent attorneys show up on a Friday afternoon with a case of beer, to get the entire team to sit in a room and brainstorm patents. Anything goes - doesn't matter if they relate to the field you work in, since the broader company works in almost every field.
As an employee, you are specifically forbidden from googling patents, because you might become aware of prior art. As long as you aren't aware... the reasoning goes that it isn't strictly-speaking illegal.
I can't say I'm surprised that cultures like that result in the sort of thing you experienced.
I'm not knowledgeable enough to talk about patents and corporations and prior art, but I did want to mention that that tech is really neat. As the parent of young kids, the intersection of storytelling, education and technology is fascinating to me, especially in the era of Youtubers and Netflix and other passive experiences.
Kudos for creating something engaging and interesting.
If the author pops in here, I hope he takes a look at this patent, because it might be prior art: https://patents.google.com/patent/US8512151 I complained about it to the "Stupid Patent of the Month" attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (here: https://www.eff.org/issues/stupid-patent-month) and got a nice response agreeing that it looks obvious.
True, but I didn't see that she identified herself, or her gender, in the article. So what's a commenter to do? That's an honest question. Mangle to use "they"? Use some genderless pronoun that'll piss off x% of readers?
In this case, you're right. Or at least, it's what I'd have done. Still, when I learned English, "they" wasn't singular. I guess that it's the norm now, but it still feels odd. And sometimes using it does require mangling. I'd rather have a set of gender-neutral pronouns, but hey.
True, but it has no bearing on what this person was taught when they learned English. It's entirely plausible that some English teachers, influenced by the criticism that arose in the 19th Century, teach that singular they is to be avoided.
Sure, I'm not attempting to say that this person was not taught that singular they was not a proper usage, just that it has been a proper usage for longer than any of us have lived.
I learned English in the context of a native language with lots more structure about genders, forms, cases and tenses. So I guess that it was something my teachers missed. And I went from that to immersion in American culture.
> True, but I didn't see that she identified herself, or her gender, in the article. So what's a commenter to do?
Simple.
1. Assume an ostensibly correct pronoun of your own choice (like you did)
2. If someone corrects you, optionally acknowledge the correction and apologize if applicable, then use the correct pronoun henceforth
3. Ignore the overly gender-obsessed people who tell you that you should have used ugly or cumbersome constructs such as "they" or, even worse, "s/he" and variants thereof.
4. Don't worry too much about it; everybody can make an honest mistake.
Calling "they" an ugly or cumbersome construct seems like a reach. I am a native english speaker, and the use of that word to describe people with unknown characteristics (such as criminal suspects and people with obscured features or seen from a distance) has been very common even before the gender-obsessed people took root. It is merely english.
It’s ironic to argue that an author’s identity doesn’t really matter, in which an author describes an eregious attempt by a company to steal credit for her work.
I'm sorry, don't see the connection you are trying to make.
In the context of her story, gender is not relevant; she apparently didn't think so either, since the only way I could tell from the article was her hands shown in the last picture.
Her identity is important, and gender is one part of her identity. She didn't state her name either in the article, does that make it OK to refer to her as "Richard Stallman" until she explicitly demands credit?
Yes of course, if someone mistakenly believed that it was Stallman that wrote the article. Conversely it's also OK for others to point out that said assumption is incorrect.
There's no reason for anyone to get worked up about it.
I used to work in the online slot machine business and saw some of the patents related to slots. Most of them seemed trivial but it did affect how we could design our games. Certain features of the reels bouncing or paylines being awarded were patented. There were other ideas like connecting players to each other that seemed like they shouldn't be patent-able.
With that perspective, this board game patent actually looks very good. It certainly isn't an idea that I've thought of before or seen.
I have heard (so very anecdotal, not confirmed), but similar stories from folks who worked with Google (not for Google).
Google would reach to incumbent telephone/infrastructure companies and tell them that they want to use their services for some super project.
To get well integrated, Google, of course need to know the details/idiosyncrasy of the existing protocols/work around conventions/etc.
So Google employees would receive all the documentation, knowledge/know-how that they could extract.
Then the project would get 'cancelled'. And then, some time later, the 'service provider' would find that Google is implementing similar capabilities that their service is providing, only as part of their some other global initiative that aims at converting majority of infrastructure services to Google.
Perhaps these stories are a reflection of the internal culture characteristic of the 'Do-more-swindle' company.
I see people below recommend NDA/etc. Sure, but US/UK legal system is heavily tilted towards who can hire better lawyers -- and the monopolies win there easily....
Tossing this out - lost the comment this was a reply to:
I'm not sure about that - my N=1
I went to a State school and got an economics degree, I started my career as a SQL-lackey for a B.I department in declining midwestern retailer, but I treated my career like graduate school insofar that I worked hard at it.
About 4 years after my first day of professional work, I started as a data scientist at a FANG. My team of 9 had 3 Ph.Ds (all science Ph. Ds). As I understood it, the Ph.Ds do receive higher compensation but it's not that much more (~18% higher base) and if I really kick butt, I can out earn them with bonuses.
But I think my path was much easier and lucrative. I was able to save ~$100k, I had a standard of living above that of a regular graduate student and I had flexibility that they would dream of. I made 4 years worth of contacts of my profession, I
I'm sure some Ph.Ds are worth it as investments, but if you're interested in renumeration, get working.
I was assigned as an inventor for a bullshit patent application our legal team did not even understand. I did everything I could to undermine it. The whole system is fucked and is all about who has more money for lawyers (who know fuck all about the matters at hand)
Google really pushes their employees to patent everything they can. During the brief time I worked there, we had multiple "patent brainstorm" meetings where we'd sit in a room and try to come up with things we could patent based on what we were working on. On top of that, they pay you a decent sum of money (low thousands, forget the exact number) for filing patents. I knew one guy who worked with various teams to file dozens of patents a year and almost doubled his salary.
That said, none of the people I knew at Google would blatantly steal other people's ideas. This sounds like a very unethical cluster of employees.
Had this already 3 times that interviewers ask me out about their Engineering problems, and how I would solve them. Initially I got good or very good feedback but then afterwards was rejected. It feels weird, also if I consider that they might do this with every person interviewed. Crowdsourcing knowledge through interviews, yay ;)
Seems far more appropriate to get toy problems, if that is needed at all, or to get scoped problems but then get reimbursed if it takes several hours.
when i was younger i was interviewing at SomeStartup(tm) in Austin TX. I had a really good conversation with their VP of Engineering, a genuinely nice guy who cared about his people. The last step in the interview was an assignment to write a fairly specific caching system. I hacked on it for a couple hours and got it working per their requirements, demo'd it, handed back the laptop, and everyone liked my work. After that, radio silence. I wonder if I got fooled into solving a problem for them. Granted, that particular problem has been solved a hundred times over so i doubt it. Regardless, i've always wondered what the real story was there. Maybe they were just being polite.
Can't read the article (in the air, data constrained).
But if you have what you think is a patentable invention, file a provisional application before you interview. The USPTO gives you a filing receipt, which might help here. Let your interviewer know you can talk about your invention because you've got a patent pending. It costs $70 to file as a micro entity. See Nolo Press for a good resources on how to do it.
I'm really not surprised or upset. Its not like Google is known for using patents to crush others. The patent system is fucked up enough that they have to try to patent everything they work on and hope to either get the patent, or as in this case, prove its unpatentable through prior art.
Its a fucked up system but I don't think its as sinister people are making it out to be.
I have often thought... "I have an idea; If I search using Google, and not really find anything relevant, does 'google' ever look at everyones 'ideas' and 'send these off to the labs to investigate further for possible patents? How would you ever know?
This comes up a bunch and if researchers want to research w/o having people sit on the sidelines and cherry pick obvious extensions to ideas, then you need to basically brainstorm in public and do so aggressively.
I would suggest having a weekly or monthly brainstorming session over vide chat, or have a wiki or emailing list with a meadow of ideas. Provide that email list as an immutable publicicly indexed and crawlable content.
Put the minutes of those meetings on line, upload the video of the "idea jam sessions" to Youtube, Vimeo, etc.
After a small amount of time, you will stake out ownership of enough avenues of research that it will be hard to patent anything. You don't have to build something to patent it, it doesn't even have to be buildable, meaning you can actually patent "problems" instead of solutions.
There's a subtle-but-sneaky way to play this game.
Put in a patent application. Abandon it.
Congratulations, your patent is now going to come up in any competent patent examiner's initial search as "potential prior art".
Patent the core technology (the "you have to do it this way" stuff), but salt the earth around it so nobody can get a patent on the sub-optimal alternatives.
Also leave subtle but important details out of the application. Your conductive ink is silver but has to have, say, palladium added to make it stable? Forget to mention the palladium, and expand the claims to cover mixtures of different metals. See if the examiner allows it.
What you describe is the standard in some industries. If a research team discovers something new, lawyers will make a patent out of it that is broad / vague enough to prevent any further research in that area by competitors. At the same time they look at the patents of competitors and if they are too specific they try to patent similar ideas.
> If a research team discovers something new, lawyers will make a patent out of it that is broad / vague enough to prevent any further research in that area by competitors.
Not quite right. If an inventor creates something marginally useful at a large company, there's no question that their lawyers will try to patent it. But the purpose is not to prevent research in the area, in fact the opposite. Once a company has a patent on something, they'd likely encourage further research, knowing that they have a financial interest in the research going to market.
All big companies do this, and once the research matures enough to become a product, all the companies have modest claim to it, but they all have an interest to bringing it to market. In some cases, these companies fight who gets what in court (e.g., CRISPR), but in others, they come together and agree on a royalty scheme roughly proportional to their contributions (e.g., MPEG, H.264).
The point is, no company patents something to stop research on that thing, it's quite the opposite.
Sorry, but I don't think you fully understand how the patent system works. Examiners generally look at published patents and patent applications. Even though they theoretically can, they don't look at abandoned patents that were never published (generally called secret 102(e) art). Also, filing a true patent application is pretty expensive, minimum $5k to do it properly. There are inexpensive options, such as provisional patent applications which can be as low as ~$100, but examiners don't look at those either.
If you're worried about someone patenting something you created, and you don't care about getting your own patent protection on your invention, you'd likely get more mileage from publishing a detailed blog article than filing a patent application.
If only it were that easy. The largest cloud company has a core component of their strategy monetization of open source. I haven’t heard them paying royalties to the people that developed the software.
Did the offer any moral or ethics explanation? How did they justify this on a human level? That always interests me about this sort of decision, surely they had many meetings on the topic, what would those minutes look like?
This sort of thing keeps me up at night as we shop for investors for our saas product. They have the money to just implement our ideas and what we show them from our beta, and most of them are in the same general space.
I'm curious if this idea is that unique -- The Exploratorium published a book called "The Art of Tinkering" in 2014 that has paper circuits that seem very similar to the authors concept.
That's the author's point -- she was working in a field where there was plenty of active work going on, but after meeting with google, the big G tried to patent it.
30 years ago, I implemented pie menus at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab, and the UMD Office of Technology Liaison wanted me to patent them, but I decided not to, and I don't regret it. The patent would have been assigned to a little patent trolling company that UMD has a parasitic relationship with, and very little of the money would have ever found its way back to me or the University.
But that's not the worst problem patenting pie menus would have caused:
If I'd patented them, it would have effectively prevented me from using them myself in subsequent proprietary and open source projects, like The NeWS Toolkit, TCL/Tk, The Sims, SimCity, Unity3D, etc.
Convincing Sun or Electronic Arts or any other employer or client to license a patented user interface interaction technique instead of using an inferior freely available one would have been a non-starter, as would have been using it in any open source projects.
It was only because I didn't file a patent that I was able to freely implement pie menus for NeWS at Sun, and use them in SimCity and The Sims.
You're not always going to be working for the same company or attending the same school for the rest of your life, so it's not a good idea to hand over all the rights to your ideas to them, because you'll have to pay if you ever want to use them again yourself. But if you give them away to everyone for free, you get to use them yourself after you leave, and they're free for everyone to use in open source projects.
>Open Sourcing SimCity: Chaim Gingold’s “Play Design” PhD Thesis: "Pie menus play a critical role in The Sim’s user interface design, dovetailing perfectly with the object and AI architecture. Objects advertise verbs to character AI, so it is natural for the verbs to be arranged in a radial menu about objects. I can’t imagine an alternate design that would have had the same widespread usability, and therefore appeal, without them. It is difficult to imagine The Sims without pie menus." -Chaim Gingold, Play Design PhD Thesis, Open Sourcing SimCity
Unfortunately other people filed misleading patents around pie menus that should never have been granted, because they tried to retroactively redefine what pie menus were by ignoring published prior art, and coined a new term "marking menu" which they defined by a straw man comparison to their self-servingly gerrymandered misunderstanding of pie menus.
So they ended up patenting fictitious "differences" between "marking menus" and "pie menus" that weren't really differences: obvious features pie menus had always had, and that I'd written about and demonstrated in SIGCHI videos, but they'd conveniently ignored, because they needed to trick the patent office into thinking those properties were unique to "marking menus".
Then they misleadingly and systematically used those patents as FUD for decades in their marketing brochures, advertisements, and word of mouth from their sales people on trade show floors. They purposefully discouraged other companies like Kinetix and open source projects like Blender from doing anything remotely resembling pie menus, whether or not they actually infringed on their patents.
Autodesk Advertisement About “Patented Marking Menus”: "Marking Menus. Quickly select commands without looking away from the design. Patented marking menus let you use context-sensitive gestures to select commands."
There is a sad history of people using software patents to make misleading claims about obvious techniques that they didn’t originate, and constructing flawed straw man definitions of ersatz pie menus to contrast with their own inventions, to mislead the patent examiners into granting patents.
There is a financial and institutional incentive to be lazy about researching and less than honest in reporting and describing prior art, in the hopes that it will slip by the patent examiners, which it very often does.
[...]
The Alias Marking Menu Patent Discouraged the Open Source Blender Community from Using Pie Menus for Decades
Here is another example that of how that long term marketing FUD succeeded in holding back progress: the Blender community was discussing when the marking menu patent would expire, in anticipation of when they might finally be able to use marking menus in blender (even though it has always been fine to use pie menus).
As the following discussion shows, there is a lot of purposefully sewn confusion and misunderstanding about the difference between marking menus and pie menus, and what exactly is patented, because of the inconsistent and inaccurate definitions and mistakes in the papers and patents and Alias’s marketing FUD:
"Hi. In a recently closed topic regarding pie menus, LiquidApe said that marking menus are a patent of Autodesk, a patent that would expire shortly. The question is: When ? When could marking menus be usable in Blender ? I couldn’t find any info on internet, mabie some of you know."
Hi Everyone! This is Jie, the author of the original post on patentpandas.org. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and experiences on this thread! I thought it might be helpful for you all to know the full story and give some more context:
The original post is actually one of TWO patent-related issues that simultaneously happened to me.
The first one was when my crowdfunding campaign backer successfully patented our LED stickers product (https://patentpandas.org/stories/crowdfunding-backer-patente...) despite us having a successful crowdfund, lots of press, research papers dating back to 2011 and an entire business by then.
And then it was about a month after I found out about the LED stickers patent, I found out that Google ATAP was trying to patent work that I had shared during the job interview (https://patentpandas.org/stories/company-patented-my-idea).
While I can understand why the google story is getting more attention, in many ways it’s actually the other story that’s more problematic, because in that case, the faulty patent application actually passed muster at the USPTO and issued as a patent.
This all happened during my last year of grad school at MIT, in the months before I defended my thesis and graduated. And it absolutely sucked!
But in the end, I was pretty lucky that both situations turned out okay(ish). The most important bit was that I had support from all these law clinics, and my own giant institution (MIT), to help me navigate. But I can already see from this thread that many others out there aren’t so lucky.
The absurdity of these situations, and that they were happening to me at the same time, got me to spend the next couple years learning about patent law at the Berkman Klein Center (https://cyber.harvard.edu). My hope was that I could better understand how the heck all this happened, and to see if I could do something to help other creators out.
That’s why I started Patentpandas.org - to have a place to share these patent stories, to help by showing how others navigated their patent problems, and (for folks like my former self) to show that it’s not so scary to work with lawyers and wade into patent law! That’s also why we’re using panda comics to illustrate patent law concepts. Pandas: definitely not scary :)
My hope is that if more creators out there better understand patent law and are connected with pro bono lawyers when they need help, then patent trolls and others who have more legal resources at their disposal won’t be able to get away with things like this so easily.
When I was at university studying CS I was running a Arduino fansite and a fansite for a videogame - both of whom made most of their money from affiliate revenue (a couple hundred bucks per month).
I thought it would be cool to work at Reddit (was close to graduating), and I had read blog posts from here and various other sites and IRC about how hiring managers liked projects.
I took to it to build a JS library that converted links to affiliate links, for example amazon and some other small retailers I had used.
Basically you just parse any URL you embed in the page with this library and it would convert the existing (non-affiliate) links to affiliate links with your signature attached so you got a revenue share.
In addition to this, I had done research on Reddit's traffics and crawled reddit to see how many affiliate-capable links existed. I talked about this in the interview and suggested they could make around 2 million per month if they hired me and used my script.
--> I was rejected after the interview, but a couple months later Reddit announced it was experimenting with a new feature that would re-write links as affiliate. They ended up implementing this feature that I am 95% sure I came up with and someone else stole.
It was one of the shittiest experiences I have ever had interviewing, especially since I didn't get a job out of it but I believe they have made millions off of this idea so far.
I huge put off, but I've learned since then backstabbing and stealing ideas is a big part of politics in most corporations. What a bummer.
Agreed. Not sure how long ago your interview was, but I remember seeing plug & play services that would add affiliate codes to links of any site via a JS snippet even 10 years ago. A friend who ran a blog network used it.
At the time, I could not find a single social media site that was using link-rewriting to make affiliate money.
Blogs and fan sites for niche products had been using this to make money for a while, social media sites had not yet tried it.
The close proximity with the announcement and my interview is what really bothered me. I have a strong feeling (but cannot prove) that someone I interviewed with took the idea and ran with it. I had done a lot of research into how much money Reddit would make off of this and how to implement it at scale without breaking existing affiliate links and such.
I had literally planned it as my pitch for what I wanted to work on and why they should hire me.
I believe you independently derived a very old, but lurcrative, idea. Kontera started off back in 2003 although I don't recall when they actually got to double-underline links. Viglink has been doing this more subtly as a commercial service since 2009, and AOL actually had a flavor of this built into Instant Messenger. There were also a number of affiliate networks that built this infrastructure to parse the Commission Junction offers database and update their networks with match/near-match products & services.
We did that at Bagcheck in 2010. It was super common. They may have taken your idea and ran with it but it wasn't a novel idea. Generally though, at scale, you run into problems with the affiliate programs and they cut you off.
It might. For example, it was one of the potential revenue sources for Bagcheck to keep it running such that people could post their product reviews to the service. Without that revenue it is possible it isn't feasible to run the service and that would decrease the number of reviews pointing to them which could reduce the number of sales they get.
Not sure if it helps, but - sometimes the time is just right for some ideas and they crop all over the place. While it may seem to you it was your idea, they could have been working on it for days / months / years... I agree it sucks for you not to be able to know that though.
Yeah it is definitely possible it was just a coincidence. But that was a couple years ago, and if Amazon has taught me anything it's that backstabbing is definitely part of the culture in many of these tech companies.
While it could be totally an accident, I could also see it being stolen. Truth is, I will never know if it was just bad timing or an actual malicious interviewer.
Think of it from another angle: You're interviewing this guy that has this idea that would be hugely rewarding for you with a payout of n% if you proposed it via the internal idea program. No one will notice. Or hire that guy and leave that to him.
This is not a new idea, and Reddit would have tried it eventually. Giving up your ideas during a job interview is also pretty stupid. If you had a "$2 million month" idea, would you have been happy no matter what they paid you?
> I talked about this in the interview and suggested they could make around 2 million per month if they hired me and used my script.
Obviously I don't know how the rest of the interview went, but the way you put it in the retelling makes it sound a lot like it was distracting from all the other reasons to hire you.
"How about that two million guy?" - "We hire developers, not libraries"
It might have been that they not only picked up the idea from the interview, but on top of that also did not hire you because of misplaced conditions. If that part came over more like "you can't if you don't", then it would be seen as a challenge: "sure we can". I think that just telling them that you have previously worked on link monetization and wrote a library about it would have been a much better interview strategy than dangling some made up number in front of their faces. As an interviewer I would fear that a candidate arguing like that would be prone to taking their regular salary as granted and renegotiate something on top for every quantifiable contribution.
The power a candidate has and should be aware of is walking away, not withholding a trivial js library. Feeling powerful for demonstrably wrong reasons will put you in a terrible light.
Alternatively maybe they had been working on the idea for awhile and it was just a coincidence. Bringing an idea to the table that they were already working on might also hurt your chances of getting a job there.
In addition to what others have said, Reddit abandoned the idea of skimming affiliates shortly after announcing the plan. They have certainly not made millions.
Really sorry to hear that. I understood patenting can be a pain and takes an inventor to get it done, but it seems like the thieves are more interested in getting patented than the inventors themselves.
I guess the best thing for you to do it in such a situation is to open source it so the whole community can benefit from it, not just one big evil company that steals ideas. At least you'd go down as a hero.
Addressing any shock and revulsion following this story:
Because capitalist organizations are literally founded upon the act of constant appropriation of the surplus value created by their own employees,
it's not reasonable to expect these organizations to somehow indulge a higher standard of treatment toward outside persons who aren't even their employees, to persons who are just dropping by to share ideas and work. Such organizations will seize with both hands whatever of value is presented to them. They seize, that's what they do. All day, every day.
If your country has "democratic" in the name it's probably not democratic. If your major has "science" in the name it's probably not science. If your company has "don't be evil" in its motto...
I've head this comment before, but from my own speech I don't find this to be true at all. It usually means I'm saying something I perceive to be more vulnerable or direct than any party to the conversation has been to that point - not at all that I was being deceptive before that point or after.
> vulnerable or direct than any party to the conversation has been to that point
You seem to be sort of acknowledging the contradiction in this one. If the conversation is guarded (self-protecting vulnerability) or indirect, then it isn't being frank.
It's a thing of its own. Used to be called informatics in some countries. Much better name, IMO. There are large parts of computer science that have nothing to do with computers. They're about information and can be applied outside of computers.
I'm with Alan Kay when he says "computer science" used to be an aspiration and eventually became a misnomer. Same with software engineering.
"We need to do away with the myth that computer science is about computers. Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes, biology is about microscopes or chemistry is about beakers and test tubes. Science is not about tools, it is about how we use them and what we find out when we do."
- Michael R. Fellows, Ian Parberry (1993) "SIGACT trying to get children excited about CS"
Unfortunately, virtually all CS programs have become Software Engineering programs save for their names. The actually thinking and theory behind it is often more of a side note as educational institutions focus on teaching students how to use specific tools that are popular at the time, leading to many people having a good idea of these specific tools, but no idea on their actual design implications or how anybody actually realized how to do these things.
Sadly, if you want to learn proper theory (what I consider to be CS) you have to get lucky and find a mathematics program that has electives so you can focus on things like discrete mathematics and information theory.
Mostly, yes, especially as an undergrad. A science forms and tests hypotheses, usually about natural phenomena. I only had a few classes in CS where we tested any hypotheses or performed any real experiments. Most of it was design and learn by rote, and not experimentation.
Theoretic Computer Science is pretty sciencey but is testing things engineers built and often testing using math rather than experiment. Algorithms and data structures use the result of some science, but don’t teach or perform much science normally. Graphics involves a lot of cross-discipline physics and math, but in practice is teaching techniques and APIs, and doing very little scientific experimentation.
Machine learning may be bringing more science into computer science. People are certainly running lots of experiments in ML today trying to figure out how neural networks behave. A lot of it is still engineering too, of course, but there is some science in there.
I think you were unfortunately downvoted. I think you're mostly accurate, but I think all sciences at the undergrad level don't teach how to do science. They teach about science. Yes, I know that there are labs, but that's rarely the emphasis. A physics and chemistry student is mostly learning things that other people have discovered and figured out. It's not until the graduate level that someone actually starts doing science as opposed to learning about science. And a lot of that is necessary: in order to be a productive scientist in any discipline, there is a lot of background material you need to understand first. The bar of entry to adding to our scientific knowledge is very high.
But, I think it would be good to include more philosophy of science - what does it mean to do science - at the undergrad level.
A physics or chemistry student is learning about empiricism on lab courses, and about how other scientists came-out with their advances. But more importantly, they are mostly studying science itself, not how use it to create practical stuff.
I don't disagree with your comment, and I don't think your comment disagrees with mine. I was agreeing with dahart that a computer science undergrad curriculum is mostly not about doing computer science, but then pointing that that is true for all sciences.
Most of the computer science curriculum is explicitly engineering. Even the courses we call theory are about how how to engineer better, more like what a mechanical engineer does when studying thermodynamics than what a physicist does when studying the same subject.
I do agree that none of them are doing science, but one is studying science itself, the other is studying a slightly different thing.
STEM and humanities sit hand in hand nowadays. STEM to turn needs into realities, humanities to effectively manage relationships/expectations across every level of stakeholders.
engineering is math too, math is eating everything, oh noes!
but not really, that's software after all. engineering is applied math, so largely software modeling, whereas CS is theoretical work. abstract problems, pure solutions.
It's applied math and applied science. The science informs how to apply the math, since the math is a model of natural phenomena. In fact, most of the math came to engineering via the science.
No, math is math, engineering is engineering, and science is science.
Engineering and science are not math, even though they use math, and engineering is not science, even though it uses science. They are all very different disciplines.
There are certain aspects of computer science that are engineering (i.e. concerned with the building of machines and structures), other that are a part of formal science, others that are a part of experimental science, ect.
Most Satanists do not believe in Satan. They do not worship the individual, directly, named Satan who is found in the Christian religion. Satanists look at Satan, especially Milton's Satan as a literary figure who embodies individualism and free thought. To that end, they are edgy Libertarians.
I ran across an interesting (fictional) variation of this viewpoint once where Satan was cast as the unsung hero of a resistance movement, fighting on behalf of human beings against a tyrannical God. Unfortunately, the resistance lost—and the "history" espoused by most major religions is basically just propaganda on behalf of the winning side. (IIRC this was mentioned offhand as background data for one character at some point in the Empire of Man series by David Weber & John Ringo.)
I have no personal stake in this one way or the other, but it's an interesting thought-experiment. If that version of events were true, would anyone be able to tell? Is it really any less plausible than the "official" version?
There's a piece of Lord of the Rings fanfic around that inverts it in the same way -- Mordor was really a democratic scientific place and they just wanted to understand how magic really worked, but were defeated by the autocratic kings of the rest of the world who wanted to keep magic to themselves. The standard history is propaganda, etc.
I think that's like a double negative. Which would imply that Scientology actually IS science, which is ridiculous of course. I think "science" in the title only means "not science" when conveyed in the language you're currently using.
neuroscience is physiological, but it deals with the study of neurons and neuronal systems rather than the output of behaviors. I always thought neurology was more of a medical field application of neuroscience.
It's very interesting that she is launching the PandaPatents site using her story as the impetus to help people navigate patent law. I haven't had time to look at it, but it sounds like an interesting idea.
I hope this catches on - it looks like there's already a second good story on the HN frontpage, about patent issues with crowdfunding.
I'm always impressed at how big a difference it can make to go from "people know this is a problem" to "there's a central place to see what this problem looks like and how much damage it can cause".
Aside from toxic corporate culture as exposed by James Damore, this is another reason never to associate with "Alphabet Corp" as a professional. Good riddance!
I think it's the other way around? I don't know why the article says 'company' but we changed the HN headline to 'Google' after it was posted here last night.
> More importantly, sharing work publicly keeps the project can alive and inspires others to continue developing!
Which a patent does too, just with a license or 20 years later. It keeps people from reinventing the wheel and gives the disclosure rights even if they didn't have the infrastructure to create or monetize on their own. This isn't one of those nefarious software patents where the whole thing would be obsolete within 5 years, this is LED books, which simply becomes more feasible as transistor sizes shrink and battery technology improves, perfect for a 20 year exclusivity period before falling into the public domain where it can be vastly more practical to create in 2033.
It does seem odd to stick with an intellectual property system that is so obviously deficient in it's stated purpose of "improving the useful arts and sciences". Current patent law amounts to a barrier to entry for most small potential competitors in any market where defensible IP is required. Big companies can cross-license or litigate around issues but small players are locked out of the markets they might want to compete in because the costs are prohibitive. Yet another example of the American system having failed to protect competition and encouraging cartelisation.
So for 20 years, if I wish to create and sell a book with transistors I have to license the idea from google (that is if they're even willing to give me a license)?
And somehow having to go through that legal loophole will keep the art of creating LED books alive? You seriously believe that?
Does the patent have complex details which would take longer than 20 years for someone to independently discover about creating LED books? If so, people do save time by waiting 20 years and then reading the patent, but that seems extremely unlikely.
> So for 20 years, if I wish to create and sell a book with transistors I have to license the idea from google (that is if they're even willing to give me a license)?
No. Google wasn't supposed to try and patent it.
I responded to a very specific piece of the article which seemed to ignore that patent applications functioning as prior art is available to subculture enthusiasts too.
The whole concluding paragraph was about making ideas that other people can build from, it wasn't about LED books in general. They want ideas to be available for others to build from but don't want others to patent it, ignoring that attempting to patent it yourself also fixes this, no matter how you actually use the patent or failed/abandoned application.
(Although, I'll concede that patenting is an expensive bet that not everyone would have the money or risk tolerance for.)
The problems with patents as prior art for new inventions are manifold:
- The common advice is for practitioners to avoid learning about existing patents, because this knowledge increases liability in case you are found to infringe. This means that the body of patented work is really only useful for patent lawyers, rather than for inventors.
- Similarly, patents are not written in ways to instruct practitioners to use techniques, but instead crafted in legal terms to claim broad areas of application while skirting previously filed patent claims. This again makes the patent library only useful to lawyers.
- In areas where patents are not common, there is a green field for patent applications that patent common techniques. This happened in software and business methods, and the article suggests it is happening in the junction of enthusiasts and crafts.
Hmm, being aware that you're infringing a patent, and continuing to do it anyway, is of course bad legally speaking.
But inventors not using parent literature is catastrophically bad. So many applications are repeated, in some fields the same thing is "invented" over and over because people don't even makea cursory attempt to understand the technology in the field vs the products available.
Being unaware of infringement, but not by willful negligence, is actually a defence against an award of damages in the UK. Precisely to protect this fundamental tier of the patent system.
If people can't use the disclosures then the system serves virtually no purpose.
> If people can't use the disclosures then the system serves virtually no purpose.
That's not quite true - although disclosure is an often argued benefit of the patent system, there are very few inventions that cannot be copied once a working item is in someone's hands, so a formal disclosure is not necessarily required to be able to build upon and extend existing work.
But even without disclosure, when appropriate patents are granted, they can "[secure] for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries" even if the patent library is not useful for research.
Yes, I was a little terse there: what I meant was the system serves little purpose for the demos who maintain it. The deal is that the inventors get their monopoly in return for the disclosure. So, without any benefit on the side of the public then their would be no purpose in maintaining the system.
Of course it also serves the public to encourage inventors by giving them a limited exclusive use. But primarily when instigated the purpose is a mutual benefit that is best embodied by education of the public arena as to the mechanisms and working of an invention.
> Of course it also serves the public to encourage inventors by giving them a limited exclusive use.
Yes.
> But primarily when instigated the purpose is a mutual benefit that is best embodied by education of the public arena as to the mechanisms and working of an invention.
This is the debate - how significant is the "education" aspect in promoting progress and public benefit? Is incentivizing new creation sufficient to promote progress without the (lacking) education aspect?
Then the whole question of whether the limited monopolies really create those incentives or just magnify profits that would already exist and open the door for abuse.
Or possibly better. Thinking of the explosion of DNA sequencing technology over the past decade, I'm kind of grateful that people reinvented the wheel about a half-dozen times (Solexa/Illumina, 454, IonTorrent, Solid, PacBio, ONT, etc.)
Just a reminder that Google, or any company for that matter, has a fiduciary duty towards their shareholders to file a patent for everything they have learned about and that hasn't been patented yet.
There's a common myth that companies have "a fiduciary duty" to make as much money as possible (especially short-term), but this has no basis in law in the US.
https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/13-354.html
"modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not do so... a for-profit corporation may take costly pollution-control and energy-conservation measures that go beyond what the law requires. A for-profit corporation that operates facilities in other countries may exceed the requirements of local law regarding working conditions and benefits. "
Thing is, if a CEO doesn't pursue profit and shareholder dividends above all else, they probably won't last long until the investors and board members vote them out.
>"companies that maximize profits by firing employees, avoiding taxes, selling shoddy products or polluting the environment can harm their shareholders more than helping them."
In which case are they really maximizing profits? Wouldn't it depend upon the risk and costs of those options verses their benefits?
It's like genetic algorithms that look like they don't work because someone miscalculated exactly what the fitness function was optimizing.
Filing a patent application for an idea you stole from another person is illegal (because you’re not the actual inventor, and the inventor oath you sign would be a lie).
Is this really the case? I know that Milton Friedman promoted this idea, but can pursuing some welfare at the cost of short-term profits be an offence?
"Independent creation" is a valid defense for copyright, but not for patents.
Something cannot be patented if prior art exists before the filing of the patent. It doesn't matter if you knew about it. Even if you can prove that the prior art is not something you were aware of at the time you filed for a patent, your patent is invalid.
That's how patents are supposed to work; inventions must be "non-obvious" to the point where no one else has ever created it nor described it before on the entire planet.
If google knows that someone else has created such things (as they must have after said visit), the only responsible thing to do is not file a patent, regardless of if they independently worked on it.
>If google knows that someone else has created such things (as they must have after said visit), the only responsible thing to do is not file a patent, regardless of if they independently worked on it. //
A job interview is not a public disclosure and so doesn't count as prior art. So novelty is not affected.
However, the applicant must derive rights (employment, assignment) from the inventor in order to apply for a patent.
In UK IIRC S.13 of the Patents Act allows an inventor to file to be named as the inventor (or co-inventor) and for the patent to be reassigned accordingly.
Of course taking Google to court is going to be a hard slog.
Friend of mine is an engineer with a law degree that works on patents. What he said was not obvious doesn't really catch what's going on. He said a patent is really a set of answers to a set of questions. The answers are usually obvious when you know what the questions are, but what questions are and why they are significant isn't obvious. That's where the work is.
> “oh there’s way too much prior art” and this patent can’t pass
afaiu, US patent office (as opposed to European) is much more relaxed about giving away patents and relies more on courts to settle disputes after the fact. That is an American patent is more likely to be revoked.
The story talks about a patent. The search on the first listed inventor brings 5 of his applications on various aspects of these electronically enriched books all almost simultaneously (after he invented additive manufacturing) - Google I suppose have nice bonuses for patents and skillful patent layers.
I believe this was an honest misunderstanding and not an attempt to steal the idea because if the patent had issued and become valuable, it would have been easily invalidated.
If a company wants to steal your patent they will "surround" your idea with other patents: method of manufacturing <idea>, method of using <idea> in <industry>, <idea> used in adjacent use case. This is a legal but slimy way to force the sale of your idea since now only they can profitably commercialize it.
> I believe this was an honest misunderstanding and not an attempt to steal the idea because if the patent had issued and become valuable, it would have been easily invalidated.
"Easily", if you have deep pockets to foot all the legal costs.
Big companies know this, hence I don't think it was an innocent misunderstanding. The fact that they wouldn't even add OP as an assignee on the patent just reinforces my view that they were acting in bad faith.
OP was lucky to catch this before the patent was issued.
On a certain level, it makes sense. Google wants to patent it to cover their bases and make sure no one else does the same thing and blocks them. It's a rational move in a shitty game.
How would it look if someone else got the patent and completely blocked Google? It's not even a question for large companies. The issue is this archaic patent and copyright system where someone "owns" an idea... Absurd.
This type of argument doesn’t stand here. Since the truth is that there is prior art, and the right thing to do is to make sure nobody got the patent, google could have make sure nobody get the patent.
Ironically that’s what they ended up doing, but i doubt it was on purpose.
> I was even invited to share my work directly with Regina Dugan, the director of ATAP at that time! I was excited, thinking perhaps I would be invited for a summer internship. It turned out they found my work so relevant that they offered me a job on the spot.
> It was a tough choice: I had just started the first year of my PhD and would’ve had to take a leave from the program to pursue this project. After asking many people, the advice was clear: stay in school. So I decided to turn down the offer and continue pursuing my PhD.
...this sounds like terrible advice? I have to wonder whether any of the "many people" consulted weren't professors.
What makes this terrible advice? Is there something in particular about landing a job at Google that makes it objectively better in every value system than continuing with a PhD that one is already seeking?
I left a very good position on the table after my undergrad, in favor of pursuing a graduate degree. I weighed my options and decided that I would rather spend some years in my youth learning how to conduct research -- lessons I believed, and still believe, will carry through into my future endeavors. I picked up an excellent job after my Master's (at the same place I had left behind previously!) and am very happy with how things played out.
I realize this is the best possible outcome, but what makes this general arc such a bad idea?
Some PhD programs focus on non-marketable topics that don't help candidates develop marketable skills, and exist only to dump the research group's drudge work on an unsuspecting soul.
Wasting years of your life in a low-pay low opportunity dead-end job that's prone to abuse just to pursuit a pipe dream is not a great career move, particularly if the alternative is landing a job at Google.
This is all true! Entering into a graduate program without being fully aware of what you’re embarking on and what you’re getting out of it is a bad idea. But I would argue this generalizes beyond just grad school.
Some people enjoy scholarship and research. There are places that support this. To generalize only slightly unfairly, most of industry is not conducive to this kind of personal goal. Pipe dream it may be, but we still have artists and musicians.
An MIT Phd opens many doors in many areas and will do throughout your life. Trust me, you won’t always be young and you won’t always be interested in the same thing.
It shouldn’t be, but it is way more difficult to get high level professional qualifications when you’re older. The expectation that reaearch students are young is quite embedded.
How much is expectations vs the reality of life circumstances? I’m mid-40s and almost surely slightly slower in raw intellect than I was 20 years ago, but being married with two young kids is much more of a limitation on my ability to earn a PhD or even MBA than any inate degradation.
A lot of people would salivate at the opportunity to become a Googler. Some of us actively shoo away the recruiters. To each their own, but I would have made the same choice.
For the most part a software engineering job at google is pretty mediocre from a coding perspective. Most people hired there will never work on cutting edge tech. For the enlightened few its amazing. This is speaking strictly about the work, and not the money/prestige/perks.
It’s almost always better to achieve for yourself instead of others. A PhD. is infinitely more valuable than a couple of years working for any company, especially if your subject is interesting enough to on-spot hire you before you finish.
And I say that as a manager who’s hired a lot of people before they earned X because their work was interesting. I don’t do it anymore, as a rule, because it crushed a lot of those people with regret later and I have to live with that.
I went to a State school and got an economics degree, I started my career as a SQL-lackey for a B.I department in declining midwestern retailer, but I treated my career like graduate school insofar that I worked hard at it.
About 4 years after my first day of professional work, I started as a data scientist at a FANG. My team of 9 had 3 Ph.Ds (all science Ph. Ds). As I understood it, the Ph.Ds do receive higher compensation but it's not that much more (~18% higher base) and if I really kick butt, I can out earn them with bonuses.
But I think my path was much easier and lucrative. I was able to save ~$100k, I had a standard of living above that of a regular graduate student and I had flexibility that they would dream of. I made 4 years worth of contacts of my profession, I
I'm sure some Ph.Ds are worth it as investments, but if you're interested in renumeration, get working.
Why did it crush them? Shouldn't the job they agreed to take with you have set them up for success? Or did they not perform well and find themselves unemployed?
You don’t get a lot of opportunities to earn a PhD, most people never get the chance. By comparison almost everyone in CS get a lot of truly great job opportunities in their lives.
That’s a PhD, we had a habit of hiring people before their finished they CS degrees because skilled people were so hard to come by back in the day. They have good careers as far as I know, but they would have had much better opportunities if they had finished their degrees, and some of them haven’t taken that well.
They asked if we ever thought about selling our technology to them before the meeting and at the meeting they baited us for how our tech worked saying we'd like to work with you tell us how it works. Once we did they left the room (Dugan's 2nd right hand man at the time and another) & 3 minutes later showed us the door saying the "race is on."
They have since been awarded patents for audio syncing across phones.
Many here will say that's just how Silicon Valley works.... takes advantage and stomps on the little guy innovators & their dreams. That's not professional and I met with many other companies like Samsung who acted with the utmost respect & professionalism towards us. Yet, Google whose motto is "Don't Be Evil," can't act in the same fashion?