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Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview

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Re: Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview

#441

Post by DonHopkins »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #376
novia wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, hello, I'm a person who didn't know, so the clarification was valuable to me.

For others, just about every bio of Nikola Tesla describes how poorly he was treated by Edison. Interesting reading.

Electrocuting dogs, cats, horses, and even an elephant, says a lot more about you as a human being than the person you're trying to discredit by electrocuting dogs, cats, horses, and even an elephant.

https://knowledgenuts.com/2013/10/19/edison-publicly-torture...

https://www.wired.com/2008/01/dayintech-0104/

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

NSFL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlPYikt_qvo

Re: Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview

#442

Post by nerpderp82 »

This comes up a bunch and if researchers want to research w/o having people sit on the sidelines and cherry pick obvious extensions to ideas, then you need to basically brainstorm in public and do so aggressively.

I would suggest having a weekly or monthly brainstorming session over vide chat, or have a wiki or emailing list with a meadow of ideas. Provide that email list as an immutable publicicly indexed and crawlable content.

Put the minutes of those meetings on line, upload the video of the "idea jam sessions" to Youtube, Vimeo, etc.

After a small amount of time, you will stake out ownership of enough avenues of research that it will be hard to patent anything. You don't have to build something to patent it, it doesn't even have to be buildable, meaning you can actually patent "problems" instead of solutions.

Thoughts?

Re: Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview

#443

Post by nerpderp82 »

jkeat wrote: post #411
ilaksh wrote: post #132

Its another example of why these types of patents shouldn't even be allowed. There are always a large number of people who don't get credit and/or won't get paid. And then all of the people who have very similar ideas or maybe the same one who get blocked from bringing products to market. If the patent system somehow made it so people like the author of this post would actually make lots of money, that would be diffe…

Patent law includes a provision for situations like this - it’s called “derivation,” meaning basically that someone stole another person’s work and tried to patent it. The rightful inventor can initiate a proceeding at the patent office to invalidate the patent and get control of the work.

If you add enough bling to an existing idea, you can patent that, if the bling you add is an obvious and probably necessary path forward, you can still steel ideas from the public domain.

Re: Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview

#444

Post by mindslight »

pmarreck wrote: post #361
paul7986 wrote: post #91

I 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.…

This is a level of douchiness I cannot fathom. What possesses these people to act in this fashion and how do they sleep at night? How is this not seen as clearly unethical behavior? A clear violation of Wheaton's Law, here. I mean... I could easily take that lollipop from that naïve baby in that baby carriage... but I don't, simply because I'm Not A Dick™. Did all of Silicon Valley get the wrong takeaway from the App…

Why do people carry out muggings? Because they gain from it. Morality and legality aren't just divergent - they're orthogonal. Just like one can perform moral and immoral actions in physical space, one can perform moral or immoral actions using the legal system. Despite the goal of the legal system being to punish immoral behavior, being able to actually formalize that is up against the limit of complexity - as soon as rules are made to discourage bad behavior, the lawful bad actors move on to using those very laws to carry out attacks.

A major meta problem in the current system is that even when bad behavior is able to be formally judged and is called out, there is still little downside for getting caught. Under a functioning legal system, Google would have to make OP whole for their time/stress/legalfees/etc incurred, and would therefore be discouraged from attacking again. Alas.

The individuals have no problem sleeping at night because there is no shortage of narratives to pick from to justify their actions - then further normalized by their peer group engaging in similar business. Nobody sees themselves as a bad person.

Re: Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview

#445

Post by nerpderp82 »

cloverich wrote: post #291
setquk wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assholes hire assholes. Eventually the assholes all float to the top and make asshole decisions. You can't win. This is a failure mode of every organisation I have ever seen.

My take on it is as long as there are instruments to abuse there will be unethical people to do so. Patent law and drug prohibition are equivalent, to me, in this way. They create unnatural economic sectors where unethical behavior is favored.

They give a legal framework for unethical people to prosper. They are "hacking" the system. Highly moral societies are especially ripe for this kind of victimization because many of the "laws" are social norms that everyone just follows.

Re: Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview

#446

Post by gpm »

yread wrote: post #342
jackgavigan wrote: post #198

IANAL, 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…

It is. And since recently there is even case law and supreme court decision for this: https://www.patentdocs.org/2018/10/supreme-court-denies-cert...

Denying cert is the supreme court deciding not to hear the case, not a supreme court decision on the content of the case.

That case appears to be civil, not criminal?

Re: Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview

#447

Post by n1231231231234 »

pmarreck wrote: post #365
mr_overalls wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money. And money. And pathological drive to win.

It's sneaky and underhanded and shady and evil. Let's use a different real-world example. An acquaintance shows me an "attic treasure" that I know is worth at least $20k on the open market. Do I offer them $100 and not tell them what it might really be worth? Does it depend on how well I know them? In my case, even if I did not know the person at all and never expected to interact with them again (basically, the reci…

The analogy breaks down, though - in Google's disfavour and in OP's favour.

OP knew that she had something valuable. But she also thought of it as a free good (libre, not gratis). As I interpret it this is because she knew that her work builds on the work of others.

At Google, they probably knew about the intellectual background of OP's innovation, too. And yet, they tried to patent it. So much about their intellectual honesty.

Re: Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview

#448

Post by [deleted] »

felipemnoa wrote: post #422
pmarreck wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a level of douchiness I cannot fathom. What possesses these people to act in this fashion and how do they sleep at night? How is this not seen as clearly unethical behavior? A clear violation of Wheaton's Law, here. I mean... I could easily take that lollipop from that naïve baby in that baby carriage... but I don't, simply because I'm Not A Dick™. Did all of Silicon Valley get the wrong takeaway from the App…

>>What possesses these people to act in this fashion and how do they sleep at night? It is very simple, they only care about themselves. Everything else is irrelevant.

[deleted]

Re: Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview

#449

Post by staticautomatic »

api wrote: post #275
village-idiot wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google’s motto was don’t be evil, they’ve clearly changed their mind.

Ignore corporate claims such as "don't be evil." 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 bi…

So it's OK for them to be evil?

Re: Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview

#450

Post by Retric »

DonHopkins wrote: post #441
mixmastamyk wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For others, just about every bio of Nikola Tesla describes how poorly he was treated by Edison. Interesting reading.

Electrocuting dogs, cats, horses, and even an elephant, says a lot more about you as a human being than the person you're trying to discredit by electrocuting dogs, cats, horses, and even an elephant. https://knowledgenuts.com/2013/10/19/edison-publicly-torture... https://www.wired.com/2008/01/dayintech-0104/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrocuting_an_Elephant NSFL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlPYikt_qvo

I don't disagree with the larger point but:

"The war of the currents (sometimes called battle of the currents) was a series of events surrounding the introduction of competing electric power transmission systems in the late 1880s and early 1890s." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_currents

Electrocuting an Elephant seems to have occurred a decade after the war of currents January 17, 1903.

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