Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview

> 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.

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?

It sounds like you would agree that joining a PhD program is not a good idea.

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.

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.

Oops

Am I missing something obvious or is it really omitted?

Edit: possibly (probably?) https://twitter.com/qijie

https://dilbert.com/strip/2006-05-06

The situation certainly seems like it.

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.

>they offered to add me as an inventor on the patent application if it meant the applications could stand. I said no

I guess the "don't be evil" thing is already well down the toilet.

What's that all about? A new form of tribute when you're called upon to kiss Google's ring?

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.

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.

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.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regina_E._Dugan

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?

Edit: Doh. It's Jie Qi :)

Reddit partners with VigLink (2016): https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.reddit.com/r/announcements/...

Hope this helps you move on.

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.

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.

https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/9c7kw6/google_i...

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.

"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.

It wasn't a new idea then either. The founder of VigLink reached out to me then to share what they were working on.

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.

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.

Kudos for creating something engaging and interesting.

"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.

Ironically, making my stuff open source has cut down a lot on that. (Github leaves a clear provenance trail.)

https://metatalk.metafilter.com/11174/Im-proposing-a-small-c...

> perfect for a 20 year exclusivity period

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.

a. some googlers met Leah for casual/interview talk

b. Leah describes her ideas in detail

c. Said Googlers steal her idea and patent it thinking 2 years is long time

d. Leah comes to know and Google is caught with hand in cookie jar

This is very Google should have practiced the do no evil. Instead they tried to salvage the situation.

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.

I guess they agreed on my behalf?

Mangle? "They" is perfectly fine to use in this situation, it's not mangling at all.

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.)

>> Why would she do something like $badthing?

Am I the only one wondering why anyone would think a person's resume should be any kind of predictor of good or bad behaviour?

Curious if you remember the wording/page number on the visitor agreement? It'll help people to be on the lookout when they visit Google.

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.

In fact, one way to get an impressive resume is to railroad others and use people as stepping stones to your way to the top.

Anyway, "they" is probably the correct way.

And google of all companies have the resources to swat away patent lawsuits with so much prior art.

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?

Recommended reading: https://www.amazon.com/Against-Intellectual-Monopoly-Michele...

Good to know

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.

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.

Ironically that’s what they ended up doing, but i doubt it was on purpose.

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. "

https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co... "companies that maximize profits by firing employees, avoiding taxes, selling shoddy products or polluting the environment can harm their shareholders more than helping them."

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.

1) that's false

2) that doesn't make it less evil, let alone acceptable

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.

- 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.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they

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)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJ9itwp_wYc&index=20&list=UU...

We revived it after seeing Google's April 2018 patent & are excited about finally getting it out to the public.

Did you learn English before 14th century? Because that's when it emerged.

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.

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.

Simply don't assume? It's not hard.

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18567672

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.

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.

> Why would she do something like this?

Because the latter may be the reason for the former

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlwwVuSUUfc

Actually it forces people to reinvent the wheel in possibly worse ways.

2. Take the time to use a search engine to look up her name, which is referenced at least two times in screenshots of emails she provides.

3. Click-through to the blog post she links, also written by herself: https://patentpandas.org/stories/crowdfunding-backer-patente...

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.

Industrial secrecy doesn't seem like a better system. Perhaps you'd like shorter term patents, or want to fix some other deficit?

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.

may be that's why they change it with doing right things (for own purpose) - https://bgr.com/2015/10/04/google-dont-be-evil-alphabet/

A company is made out of humans

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?

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.

* No taking photographs or video without permission.

* Don't disclose things you see in the office outside the office

It's literally 3 sentences, and they have handy little icons next to each.

I see nothing about IP rights assignment or anything of the sort.

And anyway, lots of methods get patented. If it’s new and nonobvious, why should the fact that it runs on a computer matter?

At promotion time, people will ask 'if you've been researching $thing for 3 months, why haven't you patented anything yet?'.

So... How is this not literally a crime?

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.

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.

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.

At least, that's what I hope.

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.

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

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.

However, I'm sure the patent lawyers made a lot

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.

Software is different, in that source and decompilation exist, you can't really keep it secret.

"The United Democratic States of North America not including Canada" would be quite the name.

"The Federal Republic of the Democratic United States of America"

(I've been in Africa waaaaay too long :) )

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.

Here are some articles about that: https://www.inquisitr.com/4935898/google-accused-of-trying-t... https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/08/after-patent-office-re...

And a HN link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14751977

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.

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.

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.)

[1] https://www.ampme.com

[2] https://www.evernote.com/l/ACo7ItT-pItKkZoYf0YJy0raGhN5255FR...

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.

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.

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.

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNhhz1yYk2U

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.

Note: I did not instigate the patent process. The company lawyers did. I extricated myself from the process early.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antitrust_(film)

1 - Erlich's term, not mine.

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.

I'm with Alan Kay when he says "computer science" used to be an aspiration and eventually became a misnomer. Same with software engineering.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyIQKBzIuBY

(Doesn't mean CS and SE are always "worse" than science and engineering. But they are currently very different.)

> Google paid generously for filing patents to help create a defensive portfolio.

> ...you would receive $1000 post-tax per person, up to $3k total

> I left Google in 2009 and the program may have changed since then.

(The events took place in 2014)

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.

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.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_University_v._Roche_M...

I'm from a scientific background. Plaigarism is the most serious allegation you can level against someone. This is a whole 'nother level.

Does she? Or does she just have an impressive patent portfolio cribbed from others' work?

Or, in fairness, did this not happen as told because there's another side to the story?

/s

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.

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.

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.

- Michael R. Fellows, Ian Parberry (1993) "SIGACT trying to get children excited about CS"

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 assumed there was something like that but interesting to see it drawn out.

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.

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.

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.

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.

edit: there are many other stories were Google behaved unethically around patent applications.

https://www.patentdocs.org/2018/10/supreme-court-denies-cert...