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!
Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview
221–230 of 510 posts
Re: Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview
#222There'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 o…
Wouldn't conventional publication achieve the same thing?
Re: Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview
#223> “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.
Re: Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview
#224Google is also fetching ideas for code and patents from publicly streamed hackathons around the world.
Re: Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview
#225I 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.…
I do not mean to be mean but why on earth would you volunteer how your tech works when someone asks without any legal protection? Talk about clueless
Re: Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview
#226I 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 , method of using in , used in adjacent use case. This is a legal but slimy way to force the sale of your idea since now only the…
> 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 tha…
There is no way a company would assign a patent they filed. Maybe they would give a low or no cost license to use it
Re: Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview
#227Re: Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like you signed something assigning your rights to the company.
If it was a job, it’s usually work for hire and not owned by him but by the company he was working for.
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.
Re: Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview
#229> 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 obsol…
> It keeps people from reinventing the wheel Actually it forces people to reinvent the wheel in possibly worse ways.
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.)
Re: Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview
#230Leah Buechley is the PhD advisor, Regina Dugan is Google ATAP, Joi Ito is Media Lab but... who is the first person speaker of the text? Am I missing something obvious or is it really omitted? Edit: possibly (probably?) https://twitter.com/qijie
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