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Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview

(patentpandas.org)
1798 points jerryX | 1 comments | 30 Nov 18 05:25 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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philpem ◴[30 Nov 18 09:38 UTC] No.18567891[source]▶
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.

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1. speedplane ◴[30 Nov 18 10:09 UTC] No.18568025[source]▶
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.