+$1k got invention disclosures? Ha, my company pays $150.
Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview
231–240 of 510 posts
Re: Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview
#232If your country has "democratic" in the name it's probably not democratic. If your major has "science" in the name it's probably not science. If your company has "don't be evil" in its motto...
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Re: Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview
#233Did you sign Google's visitor agreement? Did you read Google's visitor agreement. You give up some IP rights by signing that. This is a case where it matters. When I visited Google, I refused to sign. They just give you a badge that said you didn't sign.
On that terminal thing near the big cafeteria? they just clicked something that was obviously android and handed me one. I guess they agreed on my behalf?
No, it just confirms who the person is. No agreement is presented on that device (I am a Googler who has guests now and then).
Re: Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
And replaced with? Industrial secrecy doesn't seem like a better system. Perhaps you'd like shorter term patents, or want to fix some other deficit?
In software it is well known that nobody reads patents who does the actual work in the field. Getting rid of them would not have a meaningful downside in the dissemination of information. Most people in the industry agree software patents are bad for the software industry and they should be abolished. But, if that’s true for software, why isn’t it true for other fields? Simply put: what evidence is there patents are…
We don't have software patents (as such! [lol]) in Europe.
Software is different, in that source and decompilation exist, you can't really keep it secret.
Re: Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview
#235I 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
#236Regina 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
People don't get to the top by being ethical. They get to the top of the org chart by playing politics. Many of them are practically psychopaths.
Reminds me that anecdote, not sure who it was, he was wondering where are the Caesars or the Hitlers of our time, all that brand of ambitious, manipulative and dominant personalities. The answer, he found, was that nowadays those people are absorbed into corporate instead of going into politics.
Re: Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview
#237Regina 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
To be fair we can't be sure that she was personally involved or had knowledge of the patent application.
Re: Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview
#238I'm surprised this isn't mentioned, but there are a couple of possibilities here: a) the Google folks listed did actually steal the patent, as described b) the Google folks were working on this already, saw someone in academia that was doing very relevant work, and called them in to see if they'd like to join the team. Not clear how interview went. Unrelated to the interview, the team filed a patent when significant…
Presumably because Google didn't communicate anything along the lines of "we were already working on this". Even then, there's so much prior art in open research that the patent was invalidated anyway.
Re: Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview
#239I 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.…
No, it is clearly unprofesssional. But let's be honest: So much of what happens in corporate America today is highly unethical and unprofessional. The people who innovate have to be on the lookout for those who will gladly steal to get ahead. These people are the same little shits who did all the devious things to other people in grade school.
My own experience with patents has been about the same: Circa 2000, under the direction of my thesis adviser, I invented a means to preview website pages in a sort of flip book. We demonstrated the tech at a conference later that year. I wanted the school to help us get it patented, but they wouldn't touch it because they didn't understand the value. They were just interested in patenting work out of the chemistry department, stuff that was more "real" I guess. Anyhow, just a couple years later I saw that a company had patented our work, despite the prior art. In another paper, I described a technique for how a web browser could display tiled snapshots of web pages you had already visited. What I was trying to do at the time was develop a way to capture headless screenshots of pages while crawling websites, but it was not such an easy thing to do at the time. The tiled "hey, check out what you already visited" didn't seem like that great of a use case at the time.
I'm just happy I graduated and I pretty much gladly gave away all my ideas for free because honestly, it's not the ideas that matter, it's the examples. I feel for anyone who pours their heart into their work and then has to deal with these corporate scum who just feast on anything they can. I'm dealing with it again right now in the big data world at another giant corporation. I never really learn my lesson.
Re: Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview
#240Software patents need to be banned. In the interim, employee incentives (ego, bonuses) to being listed as an "inventor" while BigCompany remains the "assignee" could be ameliorated with a "Software Patent Hall of Shame" (SPHS), which would list software engineers complicit in software patents. This would disincentivize software engineers from stealing ideas, from allowing their work to be patented, or from signing ag…
Not just software patents. All patents. What makes software industry so special?