Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview

I'm amazed at how relaxed their response is. If I told someone about some of my work and then found out they'd tried to patent it, I would be pissed!

Yeah, like wtf?

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

That offer alone should be enough to can the whole thing.

If you want your secrets to remain secret, you shouldn’t divulge your secrets.

Probably wouldnt ring nice for MIT to go to war with google

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

You could say the same thing about any form of property.

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.

No, only about Imaginary Property.

No, it is literally true that the threat of state violence is what props up the ability to own any property.

This is so obviously wrong I have no idea how to continue.

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.

The penalty for stealing my TV might well include a bullet in the chest. I’m not sure what your point is.

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.