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. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regina_E._Dugan
Someone needs to add this incident to her Wikipedia page.
Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview
211–220 of 510 posts
Re: Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview
#212Correlation != 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
Re: Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview
#213It’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…
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…
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
Re: Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview
#214I wonder if a first line of defense could be to license the work as AGPL. Google would then probably not use it AFAIK
Re: Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview
#215IANAL, 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…
Re: Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview
#216It’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…
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…
Re: Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview
#217IANAL, 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…
Re: Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview
#218Similar story and time as Google ANS patent: https://arstechnica.com/features/2018/06/inventor-says-googl...
Re: Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yea, I realized that might be the case after posting. But, it’s an ambiguous statement in context.
Thomas Edison is notorious for doing this, so it isn’t that ambiguous.
Re: Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you want your secrets to remain secret, you shouldn’t divulge your secrets.
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…