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. Once we did they left the room (Dugan's 2nd right hand man at the time and another) & 3 minutes later showed us the door saying the "race is on."
They have since been awarded patents for audio syncing across phones.
Many here will say that's just how Silicon Valley works.... takes advantage and stomps on the little guy innovators & their dreams. That's not professional and I met with many other companies like Samsung who acted with the utmost respect & professionalism towards us. Yet, Google whose motto is "Don't Be Evil," can't act in the same fashion?
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 Apple/Xerox thing, or something?
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.
Why do elite decision makers, CEO's, boards of directors, make decisions that will certainly have adverse effects, that will literally kill people (eg. Trafigura), just to make more profit? Despite the fact that they are all already individually multi-millionaires and could not really materially improve their lives with more money?
I've ruminated on this.
I think the only reason that could explain such excess is competitiveness. To them, it is like a game. Its not about getting another yacht, its about beating the other guy. I think its the same mechanism that will drive someone to grind for many hours in an MMO or suchlike.
”For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, for which some have strayed from the faith in their greediness, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.”
I Timothy 6:10
Wow that's crazy. I didn't know they did stuff like that.
Also I didn't know Google had patents for syncing audio across phones. I wonder if any of the mobile apps (like AmpMe [1]) have to pay some license fees.
I once spent an evening researching the different apps that could sync audio across multiple devices [2]. I also wanted to build my own app, so tried to see if it would be possible (only if you have a jailbroken phone.) I just wanted to play the same audio on two pairs of AirPods. I found out that the Samsung Galaxy S9 has a Dual Audio feature, and the iPhone X can theoretically support this with Bluetooth 5.0. And the AmpMe app can sync audio across multiple phones. (I was also really surprised to find out that they're a pretty huge company with 20 full time employees.)
> AmpMe app can sync audio across multiple phones. (I was also really surprised to find out that they're a pretty huge company with 20 full time employees.)
The owner is a sketchy guy that made his money using adware (and still is) named Wajam.
I guess AmpMe is what he hope will be his legit way to make money. Until it happens, it's probably bleeding money and is founded by his adware company.
We started SpeakerBlast in March 2013 & were meeting with Google in April 2013. We filed a provisional before the meeting & have a patent in the patent office.
In retrospect why on Earth did we ever think a company whose motto was "Don't Be Evil" wouldn't be? It's like meeting someone who introduces themselves with, "Hi I'm John and I am definitely not planning to rape you to death and wear your skin as a mask."
Considering all the other corporate strategies Google employees have taken a public stand on lately, I wouldn't be surprised if there were serious fatigue on both ends - on corporate, for dealing with the constant rebellions killing major revenue sources (ex:- project maven's death being the end of any more government contracts); and for employees, who are likely sick of protesting an endless stream of obviously bad stuff while risking career alienation (ex:- dragonfly).
What's not immediately publicly evident is the opportunity cost vis a vis attrition and new hires - how many people have left from disillusionment? How many prospective employees are actively shunning Google directly because of these policies? (While a number might provide explicit feedback to recruiters about their reasons to reject, it's probable a silent majority is silently avoiding all contacts from Google recruiting.) At least personally speaking, I had a vastly more positive view of google around 2012 when I started grad school (more or less my dream company to work for at the time) than what I had when graduating (sufficient to decline any recruiting requests).
Yes. Season 2, part of the Homicide Energy Drink plot-line. EndFrame lures PP into a meeting, ostensibly to discuss funding, but instead brain rapes[1] PP.
Thank you for sharing your experience and backing up the original post; this is something I will remember should the opportunity to work with anyone associated with ATAP come up.
I'm pretty sure I've seen this on Silicon Valley. Have been telling people who don't work in IT that it's pretty much a document from season one, and they refuse to believe me.
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 big some of its people will be assholes because some people are assholes.
Google has been through several CEOs and is a publicly traded company with the latter meaning that it's subject to market pressure and activist investors. It's also a company large enough and relevant enough to be a "national security" interest, making it likely subject to government and intelligence infiltration, pressure, and micromanagement.
Certain actors have been getting away with murder for over a decade now. We have a few lucky first movers that have become alpha predators and are now stifling innovation. I can't really see any rational argument for this type of behavior benefiting our society or market at all - beyond religious adherence to the free market or if Google is working exclusively with your political party (wink wink). Hopefully regulators wake up in the near future - societies that don't protect entrepreneurs won't have any.
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.
What google did here is one of the evilest things you can do.
They are taking open research and trying to close it off. Research that they didn't even contribute to! Research that they didn't need patent rights for because it's already free for them to use. But they can't allow anyone after them to have the same privilege can they?
These are just some of the reasons patents are fundamentally broken and the patent system as a whole should be scrapped. Another big issue is that, like most any law, enforcing it costs significant money, and that cost scales depending upon who your opponent is. The cost for a little guy to enforce a patent claim against google is vastly out of proportion to the cost of google to enforce a patent claim against a little guy. This means that the patent system ends up being another form of regulatory capture used to squash competition. If we just removed patents, major corporations would be just as free as today to steal from the little guys, but at least they couldn't then weaponize their patents to crush the original inventors.
Not just patents, but all intellectual property. Copyright is arguably even more broken, lasting a century or more. It's ridiculous. My disdain for the DMCA is immeasurable, and the upcoming EU directive looks even worse.
Not only are these systems broken in their implementation, but there is little evidence that even in their most pure form they accomplished their supposed intention.
How many patents the group or each employee gets awarded per year is probably one of their employee metrics (as in one application per X months). It's not surprising that someone would grab at low hanging fruit or develop unethical methods like that to fulfill performance requirements. It's probably not the first time the group did that.
Maybe. Or maybe the conversation spurred some new idea in the same general field, and that’s what they were trying to patent. This post doesn’t say anything about what the claims were actually directed to.
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 is punishable under section 1001 of title 18 by fine or imprisonment of not more than 5 years, or both."
Would set a good example now this has come to light and especially since they tried to include the author as inventor. Proves they knew they were not the inventors.
Let us not forget when Google tried to patent an algorithm for Assymetric Numeral Systems developed by an academic scientist with intent of making it available in a public domain. Seems like this kind of practice is more common with Google than one might think.
Did 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.
But different companies use different forms of visitor NDA — and lawyers purely love to load up contract forms with "protective" language to show how knowledgeable they are. This can be dangerous to counterparties; Stanford, in effect, lost part-ownership of a patent for HIV diagnostic testing because a Stanford investigator signed a visitor NDA that included IP-assignment language [0]. The case went all the way to the (U.S.) Supreme Court (about a tangential statutory issue).
The lesson: Always RTFA before signing it (where the A stands for the agreement), because sadly there's no such thing as an accepted, named standard.
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 different. But it doesn't work that way.
There was an application that I worked on. I figured out all of the hard technical problems as the lead developer. Then when the guy got funding he kicked me off of the project, hired his friends, and filed a patent. He was "nice enough" to put my name on it but not as an assignee. Meaning I could never own any of the hard work I did.
This is the type of thing that reminds me that the idea that we really even have a civilization is a myth. Everything is just a game where the people who start with the biggest advantages and stoop low enough for the best scams come out on top.
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.
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.
The good news is that very few people are at the top. Most are in the middle, and it's entirely possible to be ethical and in a good middling position.
Also, you don’t get to be the head of an organization whose primary goal is to figure out better and more efficient ways of mass murdering people whilst having any semblance of a moral compass, either.
It does increasingly feel this way, but I think (hope?) it's selection bias. In other words we hear about the psychopaths because they are newsworthy. We don't generally hear about the average CEO, because they are average and generally follow expected social norms.
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.
Disclaimer: I am a Google employee, who isn't listed as inventor on any patents here. I don't speak for Google and all the usual blah blah.
In my experience outside of Google, typically how this works is that you will get a visit from product counsel asking if you have any patent-able work. It's not your job to ask if it's novel enough; that's the patent lawyers job.
So they bug you for months while you are trying to get work done asking about what you are working on and how it works, and then file something on your behalf. I can't recall if I even needed to sign anything before a provisional application was filed.
The way that this is pitched is that it's a necessary evil. One needs a huge patent portfolio to protect your tech inventions, because when you are sued, you can leverage your portfolio to protect yourself. I hate this system and how it works, but it is a business reality.
I don't know Regina, but I think Hanlon's razor applies. It less likely that she woke up one day and said, "well, I want to steal other people's inventions today!", than, "oh I have a bunch of work to do and need to get counsel off my back."
It doesn't make what happened here right, but I think it's unfair to assume malice.
>"I have a bunch of work to do and need to get counsel off my back"
You would have had a hell of a lot more work to do if you'd actually come up with the ideas you patented yourself, instead of stealing somebody else's bunch of work they did.
>It doesn't make what happened here right, but I think it's unfair to assume malice.
I'll probably burn some Hacker News points here but the old adage needs to be updated.
Never attribute to stupidity or malice what can be attributed to both stupidity and malice.
The same Wikipedia article that mentions a Wired article of potential conflict of interest when working for the US goverment and awarding a contract for a company she owned stock in. Totally sounds like a non-corrupt human.
As a result of many real world experiences I've started to see ridiculously impressive looking resumes as a contrarian indicator.
When I see a resume that cites multiple company foundings, dozens of patents, dozens of projects, etc. I know the person is either stealing or taking credit for others work or just padding their resume in the more conventional sense. It says this person is a liar, exaggerator, narcissist, or sociopath.
It's simply not physically possible for a human being to do the amount of stuff I see on some resumes/CVs. There are not enough hours in a day to actually invent (as in actually conceptualize, research, and prove) a hundred things in 20 years or found (as in actually shepherd to success) dozens of companies. Founding one successful company takes several years and a ridiculous amount of work. Founding two or three in a life time is possible but off the charts impressive and the number of people who can realistically claim this are few. Dozens? Physically impossible, but I've seen such things claimed... by people whom I later saw were total liars and sociopaths.
Edit: it's different if they accurately claim to have managed people who have done these things, like "managed a research organization with over 200 patents and 1000 publications" or "founded company X and also contributed as an advisor to companies Y and Z" etc. It's also important to note authorship positions in long lists of publications since some science teams add everyone who ever touched a project as an author. Being listed on a bunch of publications with 15 authors is not a contrarian indicator, but claiming to be a primary researcher on absurd numbers of things can be.
Not saying it's not Wikipedia material, but perhaps a site nice and searchable site of misdeeds so we won't forget? Does something like this already exist?
I assume that statement has less to do with good behavior and more to do with doing something that can bite you in the ass when you have so much to lose.
Julian Assange did culture shifting work with Wikileaks, but allegedly sexually assaulted 2 women.
Adrian Peterson is possibly the best running back to ever play in the NFL, but has recently admitted that he still beats his children.
Steve Jobs created products that advanced how we use technology in our every day lives by leaps and bounds, but by all accounts was cruel to his daughter.
People can achieve amazing, important things in their professional life, but it's no indication that they're good people.
But this is not a matter of personal vs professional life. What she did was on a professional capacity. Not really comparable to all the examples you gave.
That's hilarious. 3 months is far too short of a time to actually invent anything meaningful and get far enough along with it to determine whether it would actually be worth patenting.
It’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 my lawyer to contact you with our NDA process” or if you’re really worried “fuck off”.
It’s probably better to file patent first though. The patent is what you need to sell them.
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 just the claims that the misconduct occurred in: https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s2016.html
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.
Designing am organization and keeping it running well are incredibly difficult. What you see as encouraging poor behavior could easily be poor management. I have never worked at Google so I do not know.
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 cynical mind to even think of patenting something like an electronics-integrated storybook. This is not a remotely new idea (story/picture books with embedded electronics have been around for decades), and there’s no fundamental innovation at the root of these patents. This is just the worst impulses of VC culture out of control.
The bonuses are actually not that large. The real motivation is to have patents to put into your promo packet to help you the next time you apply for promotion.
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.
> It’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.
How the organisations react to that bad apples is what matters. I have seen companies ruined by half a dozen people that bully others, play office politics and blame games. Most of the people were fantastic, but the CEO will do nothing about this bullies in high positions.
If a company has no way of dealing with these people, the company does not deserve to survive. So, yes there are bad apples. But, the companies have the tools to make them correct their behaviour or get rid of them.
> It’s probably better to file patent first though.
Yes. Completely agree. Companies should play nice, but you should protect yourself just in case.
Interestingly enough in the hierarchy of power in that context, MIT has more than Google.
MIT is free standing when it comes to their finances. They have a $16.4 billion endowment. So Google (etc) doesn't have economic leverage over them, such that MIT always needs money and can't afford to ever cross large organizations.
If you get three or four of the better schools together in the conflict, Google would beg forgiveness. They desperately need access to the best those schools have to offer, and they know it. That access and relationship is worth more than gold or pride to them. Money? They've got so much they have no idea what to do with it. Get cut out of critical relationships with elite schools and that can take enough of your edge away over time that you start losing in subsequent competitive rounds of don't be killed by tech inflection.
There were no secrets here. This was work, which was publicly published and promoted, which a third party then tried to not only plagiarize but also to lock others out of using.
I'm from a scientific background. Plaigarism is the most serious allegation you can level against someone. This is a whole 'nother level.
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 patent is worth defending. In this case, she was able to demonstrate prior art, meaning that a patent could not be granted since they have no idea to protect since it's been in the public domain (i.e. released to the world) and not an original/non-trivial idea. This is why academic publication, or in the past the use of laboratory journals, are useful in documenting time of the invention.
There is a big difference between open research that you don't want Google to lock away behind a patent and 'secrets'. Her ideas weren't secret, she just didn't want Google to own the patent to it.
The story in the article about Jill MacKay stealing their LED sticker idea then trying to sell them the patent for $5m is infuriating. Goes to show you can get scammed by some jeweler in Colorado just as fast and easily as by huge Corp like Google.
I suppose it's possible she had the idea, saw their kickstarter then submitted a patent to CYA. But then why back the kickstarter? Just feels fishy.
Probably the same reason some major companies (FTSE250/Fortune 500) do the same thing. It's called a "competitor product teardown" - the goal is to identify things your competitors are doing, whether they're patented, and whether you can do the same thing (or something similar) to improve your own product.
It's basically the BigCo Inc. version of "that's a great idea, I'm glad I thought of it". (and usually patented it too)
That makes me sick. What a disgusting parasite. And you don’t see anything condemning her actions. I wish that was the first result when you search her filthy name. Would hopefully impact her jewelry business.
It was sad to read the thread where Jarek Duda introduces himself to the WebM codec developers group and suggests using Asymmetric Numeral Systems for VP9 / AV1.
Then he notices patent applications about his algorithm and asks Google to help: "Maybe Google could help fighting with it?"
It seems that Google helped by patenting it themselves??? So sad.
I'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 progress was being made.
Correlation != 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
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.
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 agreements which would force them to do so, since doing so would undermine their prospects with future employers, who believe in free and open software and unencumbered computer science research.
First place I worked for had something like that except it was a supposed new customer that took their technical sales documentation and gave them to a competitor to develop a competing system. They also sent two of the competitors engineers to training sessions.
I've been named an inventor on several patents. If I read the applications, I hardly recognize the 'art' we invented. Somehow the legalese gets derailed, or they asked somebody else (not me) to help describe it. Anyway, the patent and the idea (software organization) are hardly recognizable as related.
Note: I did not instigate the patent process. The company lawyers did. I extricated myself from the process early.
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 a benefit to society instead of a harm?
Nothing. Industry secrets is a far better model than giving major corporations access to government power that they can use to crush smaller competition, sometimes for work that they stole from the smaller competition.
You may be underestimating the sheer pressure to file patents at big tech firms. Some companies have annual filing quotas, not just for patent attorneys, but also for engineers. Not filing enough patent applications may negatively affect your performance review.
I've had patent attorneys show up on a Friday afternoon with a case of beer, to get the entire team to sit in a room and brainstorm patents. Anything goes - doesn't matter if they relate to the field you work in, since the broader company works in almost every field.
As an employee, you are specifically forbidden from googling patents, because you might become aware of prior art. As long as you aren't aware... the reasoning goes that it isn't strictly-speaking illegal.
I can't say I'm surprised that cultures like that result in the sort of thing you experienced.
I'm not knowledgeable enough to talk about patents and corporations and prior art, but I did want to mention that that tech is really neat. As the parent of young kids, the intersection of storytelling, education and technology is fascinating to me, especially in the era of Youtubers and Netflix and other passive experiences.
Kudos for creating something engaging and interesting.
If the author pops in here, I hope he takes a look at this patent, because it might be prior art: https://patents.google.com/patent/US8512151 I complained about it to the "Stupid Patent of the Month" attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (here: https://www.eff.org/issues/stupid-patent-month) and got a nice response agreeing that it looks obvious.
True, but I didn't see that she identified herself, or her gender, in the article. So what's a commenter to do? That's an honest question. Mangle to use "they"? Use some genderless pronoun that'll piss off x% of readers?
I used to work in the online slot machine business and saw some of the patents related to slots. Most of them seemed trivial but it did affect how we could design our games. Certain features of the reels bouncing or paylines being awarded were patented. There were other ideas like connecting players to each other that seemed like they shouldn't be patent-able.
With that perspective, this board game patent actually looks very good. It certainly isn't an idea that I've thought of before or seen.
I have heard (so very anecdotal, not confirmed), but similar stories from folks who worked with Google (not for Google).
Google would reach to incumbent telephone/infrastructure companies and tell them that they want to use their services for some super project.
To get well integrated, Google, of course need to know the details/idiosyncrasy of the existing protocols/work around conventions/etc.
So Google employees would receive all the documentation, knowledge/know-how that they could extract.
Then the project would get 'cancelled'. And then, some time later, the 'service provider' would find that Google is implementing similar capabilities that their service is providing, only as part of their some other global initiative that aims at converting majority of infrastructure services to Google.
Perhaps these stories are a reflection of the internal culture characteristic of the 'Do-more-swindle' company.
I see people below recommend NDA/etc. Sure, but US/UK legal system is heavily tilted towards who can hire better lawyers -- and the monopolies win there easily....
Tossing this out - lost the comment this was a reply to:
I'm not sure about that - my N=1
I went to a State school and got an economics degree, I started my career as a SQL-lackey for a B.I department in declining midwestern retailer, but I treated my career like graduate school insofar that I worked hard at it.
About 4 years after my first day of professional work, I started as a data scientist at a FANG. My team of 9 had 3 Ph.Ds (all science Ph. Ds). As I understood it, the Ph.Ds do receive higher compensation but it's not that much more (~18% higher base) and if I really kick butt, I can out earn them with bonuses.
But I think my path was much easier and lucrative. I was able to save ~$100k, I had a standard of living above that of a regular graduate student and I had flexibility that they would dream of. I made 4 years worth of contacts of my profession, I
I'm sure some Ph.Ds are worth it as investments, but if you're interested in renumeration, get working.
I was assigned as an inventor for a bullshit patent application our legal team did not even understand. I did everything I could to undermine it. The whole system is fucked and is all about who has more money for lawyers (who know fuck all about the matters at hand)
Google really pushes their employees to patent everything they can. During the brief time I worked there, we had multiple "patent brainstorm" meetings where we'd sit in a room and try to come up with things we could patent based on what we were working on. On top of that, they pay you a decent sum of money (low thousands, forget the exact number) for filing patents. I knew one guy who worked with various teams to file dozens of patents a year and almost doubled his salary.
That said, none of the people I knew at Google would blatantly steal other people's ideas. This sounds like a very unethical cluster of employees.
Had this already 3 times that interviewers ask me out about their Engineering problems, and how I would solve them. Initially I got good or very good feedback but then afterwards was rejected. It feels weird, also if I consider that they might do this with every person interviewed. Crowdsourcing knowledge through interviews, yay ;)
Seems far more appropriate to get toy problems, if that is needed at all, or to get scoped problems but then get reimbursed if it takes several hours.
when i was younger i was interviewing at SomeStartup(tm) in Austin TX. I had a really good conversation with their VP of Engineering, a genuinely nice guy who cared about his people. The last step in the interview was an assignment to write a fairly specific caching system. I hacked on it for a couple hours and got it working per their requirements, demo'd it, handed back the laptop, and everyone liked my work. After that, radio silence. I wonder if I got fooled into solving a problem for them. Granted, that particular problem has been solved a hundred times over so i doubt it. Regardless, i've always wondered what the real story was there. Maybe they were just being polite.
Can't read the article (in the air, data constrained).
But if you have what you think is a patentable invention, file a provisional application before you interview. The USPTO gives you a filing receipt, which might help here. Let your interviewer know you can talk about your invention because you've got a patent pending. It costs $70 to file as a micro entity. See Nolo Press for a good resources on how to do it.
I'm really not surprised or upset. Its not like Google is known for using patents to crush others. The patent system is fucked up enough that they have to try to patent everything they work on and hope to either get the patent, or as in this case, prove its unpatentable through prior art.
Its a fucked up system but I don't think its as sinister people are making it out to be.
I have often thought... "I have an idea; If I search using Google, and not really find anything relevant, does 'google' ever look at everyones 'ideas' and 'send these off to the labs to investigate further for possible patents? How would you ever know?
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.
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.
What you describe is the standard in some industries. If a research team discovers something new, lawyers will make a patent out of it that is broad / vague enough to prevent any further research in that area by competitors. At the same time they look at the patents of competitors and if they are too specific they try to patent similar ideas.
> If a research team discovers something new, lawyers will make a patent out of it that is broad / vague enough to prevent any further research in that area by competitors.
Not quite right. If an inventor creates something marginally useful at a large company, there's no question that their lawyers will try to patent it. But the purpose is not to prevent research in the area, in fact the opposite. Once a company has a patent on something, they'd likely encourage further research, knowing that they have a financial interest in the research going to market.
All big companies do this, and once the research matures enough to become a product, all the companies have modest claim to it, but they all have an interest to bringing it to market. In some cases, these companies fight who gets what in court (e.g., CRISPR), but in others, they come together and agree on a royalty scheme roughly proportional to their contributions (e.g., MPEG, H.264).
The point is, no company patents something to stop research on that thing, it's quite the opposite.
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.
If only it were that easy. The largest cloud company has a core component of their strategy monetization of open source. I haven’t heard them paying royalties to the people that developed the software.
Did the offer any moral or ethics explanation? How did they justify this on a human level? That always interests me about this sort of decision, surely they had many meetings on the topic, what would those minutes look like?
This sort of thing keeps me up at night as we shop for investors for our saas product. They have the money to just implement our ideas and what we show them from our beta, and most of them are in the same general space.
I'm curious if this idea is that unique -- The Exploratorium published a book called "The Art of Tinkering" in 2014 that has paper circuits that seem very similar to the authors concept.
That's the author's point -- she was working in a field where there was plenty of active work going on, but after meeting with google, the big G tried to patent it.
30 years ago, I implemented pie menus at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab, and the UMD Office of Technology Liaison wanted me to patent them, but I decided not to, and I don't regret it. The patent would have been assigned to a little patent trolling company that UMD has a parasitic relationship with, and very little of the money would have ever found its way back to me or the University.
But that's not the worst problem patenting pie menus would have caused:
If I'd patented them, it would have effectively prevented me from using them myself in subsequent proprietary and open source projects, like The NeWS Toolkit, TCL/Tk, The Sims, SimCity, Unity3D, etc.
Convincing Sun or Electronic Arts or any other employer or client to license a patented user interface interaction technique instead of using an inferior freely available one would have been a non-starter, as would have been using it in any open source projects.
It was only because I didn't file a patent that I was able to freely implement pie menus for NeWS at Sun, and use them in SimCity and The Sims.
You're not always going to be working for the same company or attending the same school for the rest of your life, so it's not a good idea to hand over all the rights to your ideas to them, because you'll have to pay if you ever want to use them again yourself. But if you give them away to everyone for free, you get to use them yourself after you leave, and they're free for everyone to use in open source projects.
>Open Sourcing SimCity: Chaim Gingold’s “Play Design” PhD Thesis: "Pie menus play a critical role in The Sim’s user interface design, dovetailing perfectly with the object and AI architecture. Objects advertise verbs to character AI, so it is natural for the verbs to be arranged in a radial menu about objects. I can’t imagine an alternate design that would have had the same widespread usability, and therefore appeal, without them. It is difficult to imagine The Sims without pie menus." -Chaim Gingold, Play Design PhD Thesis, Open Sourcing SimCity
Unfortunately other people filed misleading patents around pie menus that should never have been granted, because they tried to retroactively redefine what pie menus were by ignoring published prior art, and coined a new term "marking menu" which they defined by a straw man comparison to their self-servingly gerrymandered misunderstanding of pie menus.
So they ended up patenting fictitious "differences" between "marking menus" and "pie menus" that weren't really differences: obvious features pie menus had always had, and that I'd written about and demonstrated in SIGCHI videos, but they'd conveniently ignored, because they needed to trick the patent office into thinking those properties were unique to "marking menus".
Then they misleadingly and systematically used those patents as FUD for decades in their marketing brochures, advertisements, and word of mouth from their sales people on trade show floors. They purposefully discouraged other companies like Kinetix and open source projects like Blender from doing anything remotely resembling pie menus, whether or not they actually infringed on their patents.
Autodesk Advertisement About “Patented Marking Menus”: "Marking Menus. Quickly select commands without looking away from the design. Patented marking menus let you use context-sensitive gestures to select commands."
There is a sad history of people using software patents to make misleading claims about obvious techniques that they didn’t originate, and constructing flawed straw man definitions of ersatz pie menus to contrast with their own inventions, to mislead the patent examiners into granting patents.
There is a financial and institutional incentive to be lazy about researching and less than honest in reporting and describing prior art, in the hopes that it will slip by the patent examiners, which it very often does.
[...]
The Alias Marking Menu Patent Discouraged the Open Source Blender Community from Using Pie Menus for Decades
Here is another example that of how that long term marketing FUD succeeded in holding back progress: the Blender community was discussing when the marking menu patent would expire, in anticipation of when they might finally be able to use marking menus in blender (even though it has always been fine to use pie menus).
As the following discussion shows, there is a lot of purposefully sewn confusion and misunderstanding about the difference between marking menus and pie menus, and what exactly is patented, because of the inconsistent and inaccurate definitions and mistakes in the papers and patents and Alias’s marketing FUD:
"Hi. In a recently closed topic regarding pie menus, LiquidApe said that marking menus are a patent of Autodesk, a patent that would expire shortly. The question is: When ? When could marking menus be usable in Blender ? I couldn’t find any info on internet, mabie some of you know."
Hi Everyone! This is Jie, the author of the original post on patentpandas.org. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and experiences on this thread! I thought it might be helpful for you all to know the full story and give some more context:
The original post is actually one of TWO patent-related issues that simultaneously happened to me.
The first one was when my crowdfunding campaign backer successfully patented our LED stickers product (https://patentpandas.org/stories/crowdfunding-backer-patente...) despite us having a successful crowdfund, lots of press, research papers dating back to 2011 and an entire business by then.
And then it was about a month after I found out about the LED stickers patent, I found out that Google ATAP was trying to patent work that I had shared during the job interview (https://patentpandas.org/stories/company-patented-my-idea).
While I can understand why the google story is getting more attention, in many ways it’s actually the other story that’s more problematic, because in that case, the faulty patent application actually passed muster at the USPTO and issued as a patent.
This all happened during my last year of grad school at MIT, in the months before I defended my thesis and graduated. And it absolutely sucked!
But in the end, I was pretty lucky that both situations turned out okay(ish). The most important bit was that I had support from all these law clinics, and my own giant institution (MIT), to help me navigate. But I can already see from this thread that many others out there aren’t so lucky.
The absurdity of these situations, and that they were happening to me at the same time, got me to spend the next couple years learning about patent law at the Berkman Klein Center (https://cyber.harvard.edu). My hope was that I could better understand how the heck all this happened, and to see if I could do something to help other creators out.
That’s why I started Patentpandas.org - to have a place to share these patent stories, to help by showing how others navigated their patent problems, and (for folks like my former self) to show that it’s not so scary to work with lawyers and wade into patent law! That’s also why we’re using panda comics to illustrate patent law concepts. Pandas: definitely not scary :)
My hope is that if more creators out there better understand patent law and are connected with pro bono lawyers when they need help, then patent trolls and others who have more legal resources at their disposal won’t be able to get away with things like this so easily.
When I was at university studying CS I was running a Arduino fansite and a fansite for a videogame - both of whom made most of their money from affiliate revenue (a couple hundred bucks per month).
I thought it would be cool to work at Reddit (was close to graduating), and I had read blog posts from here and various other sites and IRC about how hiring managers liked projects.
I took to it to build a JS library that converted links to affiliate links, for example amazon and some other small retailers I had used.
Basically you just parse any URL you embed in the page with this library and it would convert the existing (non-affiliate) links to affiliate links with your signature attached so you got a revenue share.
In addition to this, I had done research on Reddit's traffics and crawled reddit to see how many affiliate-capable links existed. I talked about this in the interview and suggested they could make around 2 million per month if they hired me and used my script.
--> I was rejected after the interview, but a couple months later Reddit announced it was experimenting with a new feature that would re-write links as affiliate. They ended up implementing this feature that I am 95% sure I came up with and someone else stole.
It was one of the shittiest experiences I have ever had interviewing, especially since I didn't get a job out of it but I believe they have made millions off of this idea so far.
I huge put off, but I've learned since then backstabbing and stealing ideas is a big part of politics in most corporations. What a bummer.
Agreed. Not sure how long ago your interview was, but I remember seeing plug & play services that would add affiliate codes to links of any site via a JS snippet even 10 years ago. A friend who ran a blog network used it.
At the time, I could not find a single social media site that was using link-rewriting to make affiliate money.
Blogs and fan sites for niche products had been using this to make money for a while, social media sites had not yet tried it.
The close proximity with the announcement and my interview is what really bothered me. I have a strong feeling (but cannot prove) that someone I interviewed with took the idea and ran with it. I had done a lot of research into how much money Reddit would make off of this and how to implement it at scale without breaking existing affiliate links and such.
I had literally planned it as my pitch for what I wanted to work on and why they should hire me.
This is not a new idea, and Reddit would have tried it eventually. Giving up your ideas during a job interview is also pretty stupid. If you had a "$2 million month" idea, would you have been happy no matter what they paid you?
> I talked about this in the interview and suggested they could make around 2 million per month if they hired me and used my script.
Obviously I don't know how the rest of the interview went, but the way you put it in the retelling makes it sound a lot like it was distracting from all the other reasons to hire you.
"How about that two million guy?" - "We hire developers, not libraries"
It might have been that they not only picked up the idea from the interview, but on top of that also did not hire you because of misplaced conditions. If that part came over more like "you can't if you don't", then it would be seen as a challenge: "sure we can". I think that just telling them that you have previously worked on link monetization and wrote a library about it would have been a much better interview strategy than dangling some made up number in front of their faces. As an interviewer I would fear that a candidate arguing like that would be prone to taking their regular salary as granted and renegotiate something on top for every quantifiable contribution.
Alternatively maybe they had been working on the idea for awhile and it was just a coincidence. Bringing an idea to the table that they were already working on might also hurt your chances of getting a job there.
In addition to what others have said, Reddit abandoned the idea of skimming affiliates shortly after announcing the plan. They have certainly not made millions.
Really sorry to hear that. I understood patenting can be a pain and takes an inventor to get it done, but it seems like the thieves are more interested in getting patented than the inventors themselves.
I guess the best thing for you to do it in such a situation is to open source it so the whole community can benefit from it, not just one big evil company that steals ideas. At least you'd go down as a hero.
Addressing any shock and revulsion following this story:
Because capitalist organizations are literally founded upon the act of constant appropriation of the surplus value created by their own employees,
it's not reasonable to expect these organizations to somehow indulge a higher standard of treatment toward outside persons who aren't even their employees, to persons who are just dropping by to share ideas and work. Such organizations will seize with both hands whatever of value is presented to them. They seize, that's what they do. All day, every day.
If 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...
It's a thing of its own. Used to be called informatics in some countries. Much better name, IMO. There are large parts of computer science that have nothing to do with computers. They're about information and can be applied outside of computers.
I'm with Alan Kay when he says "computer science" used to be an aspiration and eventually became a misnomer. Same with software engineering.
Mostly, yes, especially as an undergrad. A science forms and tests hypotheses, usually about natural phenomena. I only had a few classes in CS where we tested any hypotheses or performed any real experiments. Most of it was design and learn by rote, and not experimentation.
Theoretic Computer Science is pretty sciencey but is testing things engineers built and often testing using math rather than experiment. Algorithms and data structures use the result of some science, but don’t teach or perform much science normally. Graphics involves a lot of cross-discipline physics and math, but in practice is teaching techniques and APIs, and doing very little scientific experimentation.
Machine learning may be bringing more science into computer science. People are certainly running lots of experiments in ML today trying to figure out how neural networks behave. A lot of it is still engineering too, of course, but there is some science in there.
There are certain aspects of computer science that are engineering (i.e. concerned with the building of machines and structures), other that are a part of formal science, others that are a part of experimental science, ect.
It's very interesting that she is launching the PandaPatents site using her story as the impetus to help people navigate patent law. I haven't had time to look at it, but it sounds like an interesting idea.
I hope this catches on - it looks like there's already a second good story on the HN frontpage, about patent issues with crowdfunding.
I'm always impressed at how big a difference it can make to go from "people know this is a problem" to "there's a central place to see what this problem looks like and how much damage it can cause".
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!
I think it's the other way around? I don't know why the article says 'company' but we changed the HN headline to 'Google' after it was posted here last night.
> 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 obsolete within 5 years, this is LED books, which simply becomes more feasible as transistor sizes shrink and battery technology improves, perfect for a 20 year exclusivity period before falling into the public domain where it can be vastly more practical to create in 2033.
It does seem odd to stick with an intellectual property system that is so obviously deficient in it's stated purpose of "improving the useful arts and sciences". Current patent law amounts to a barrier to entry for most small potential competitors in any market where defensible IP is required. Big companies can cross-license or litigate around issues but small players are locked out of the markets they might want to compete in because the costs are prohibitive. Yet another example of the American system having failed to protect competition and encouraging cartelisation.
So for 20 years, if I wish to create and sell a book with transistors I have to license the idea from google (that is if they're even willing to give me a license)?
And somehow having to go through that legal loophole will keep the art of creating LED books alive? You seriously believe that?
Does the patent have complex details which would take longer than 20 years for someone to independently discover about creating LED books? If so, people do save time by waiting 20 years and then reading the patent, but that seems extremely unlikely.
> So for 20 years, if I wish to create and sell a book with transistors I have to license the idea from google (that is if they're even willing to give me a license)?
No. Google wasn't supposed to try and patent it.
I responded to a very specific piece of the article which seemed to ignore that patent applications functioning as prior art is available to subculture enthusiasts too.
The whole concluding paragraph was about making ideas that other people can build from, it wasn't about LED books in general. They want ideas to be available for others to build from but don't want others to patent it, ignoring that attempting to patent it yourself also fixes this, no matter how you actually use the patent or failed/abandoned application.
(Although, I'll concede that patenting is an expensive bet that not everyone would have the money or risk tolerance for.)
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.)
Just a reminder that Google, or any company for that matter, has a fiduciary duty towards their shareholders to file a patent for everything they have learned about and that hasn't been patented yet.
There's a common myth that companies have "a fiduciary duty" to make as much money as possible (especially short-term), but this has no basis in law in the US.
https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/13-354.html
"modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not do so... a for-profit corporation may take costly pollution-control and energy-conservation measures that go beyond what the law requires. A for-profit corporation that operates facilities in other countries may exceed the requirements of local law regarding working conditions and benefits. "
Thing is, if a CEO doesn't pursue profit and shareholder dividends above all else, they probably won't last long until the investors and board members vote them out.
>"companies that maximize profits by firing employees, avoiding taxes, selling shoddy products or polluting the environment can harm their shareholders more than helping them."
In which case are they really maximizing profits? Wouldn't it depend upon the risk and costs of those options verses their benefits?
It's like genetic algorithms that look like they don't work because someone miscalculated exactly what the fitness function was optimizing.
Filing a patent application for an idea you stole from another person is illegal (because you’re not the actual inventor, and the inventor oath you sign would be a lie).
Is this really the case? I know that Milton Friedman promoted this idea, but can pursuing some welfare at the cost of short-term profits be an offence?
"Independent creation" is a valid defense for copyright, but not for patents.
Something cannot be patented if prior art exists before the filing of the patent. It doesn't matter if you knew about it. Even if you can prove that the prior art is not something you were aware of at the time you filed for a patent, your patent is invalid.
That's how patents are supposed to work; inventions must be "non-obvious" to the point where no one else has ever created it nor described it before on the entire planet.
If google knows that someone else has created such things (as they must have after said visit), the only responsible thing to do is not file a patent, regardless of if they independently worked on it.
>If google knows that someone else has created such things (as they must have after said visit), the only responsible thing to do is not file a patent, regardless of if they independently worked on it. //
A job interview is not a public disclosure and so doesn't count as prior art. So novelty is not affected.
However, the applicant must derive rights (employment, assignment) from the inventor in order to apply for a patent.
In UK IIRC S.13 of the Patents Act allows an inventor to file to be named as the inventor (or co-inventor) and for the patent to be reassigned accordingly.
Of course taking Google to court is going to be a hard slog.
Friend of mine is an engineer with a law degree that works on patents. What he said was not obvious doesn't really catch what's going on. He said a patent is really a set of answers to a set of questions. The answers are usually obvious when you know what the questions are, but what questions are and why they are significant isn't obvious. That's where the work is.
> “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.
The story talks about a patent. The search on the first listed inventor brings 5 of his applications on various aspects of these electronically enriched books all almost simultaneously (after he invented additive manufacturing) - Google I suppose have nice bonuses for patents and skillful patent layers.
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.
If a company wants to steal your patent they will "surround" your idea with other patents: method of manufacturing <idea>, method of using <idea> in <industry>, <idea> used in adjacent use case. This is a legal but slimy way to force the sale of your idea since now only they can profitably commercialize it.
> 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 that they were acting in bad faith.
OP was lucky to catch this before the patent was issued.
On a certain level, it makes sense. Google wants to patent it to cover their bases and make sure no one else does the same thing and blocks them. It's a rational move in a shitty game.
How would it look if someone else got the patent and completely blocked Google? It's not even a question for large companies. The issue is this archaic patent and copyright system where someone "owns" an idea... Absurd.
> I was even invited to share my work directly with Regina Dugan, the director of ATAP at that time! I was excited, thinking perhaps I would be invited for a summer internship. It turned out they found my work so relevant that they offered me a job on the spot.
> It was a tough choice: I had just started the first year of my PhD and would’ve had to take a leave from the program to pursue this project. After asking many people, the advice was clear: stay in school. So I decided to turn down the offer and continue pursuing my PhD.
...this sounds like terrible advice? I have to wonder whether any of the "many people" consulted weren't professors.
What makes this terrible advice? Is there something in particular about landing a job at Google that makes it objectively better in every value system than continuing with a PhD that one is already seeking?
I left a very good position on the table after my undergrad, in favor of pursuing a graduate degree. I weighed my options and decided that I would rather spend some years in my youth learning how to conduct research -- lessons I believed, and still believe, will carry through into my future endeavors. I picked up an excellent job after my Master's (at the same place I had left behind previously!) and am very happy with how things played out.
I realize this is the best possible outcome, but what makes this general arc such a bad idea?
Some PhD programs focus on non-marketable topics that don't help candidates develop marketable skills, and exist only to dump the research group's drudge work on an unsuspecting soul.
Wasting years of your life in a low-pay low opportunity dead-end job that's prone to abuse just to pursuit a pipe dream is not a great career move, particularly if the alternative is landing a job at Google.
An MIT Phd opens many doors in many areas and will do throughout your life. Trust me, you won’t always be young and you won’t always be interested in the same thing.
It shouldn’t be, but it is way more difficult to get high level professional qualifications when you’re older. The expectation that reaearch students are young is quite embedded.
How much is expectations vs the reality of life circumstances? I’m mid-40s and almost surely slightly slower in raw intellect than I was 20 years ago, but being married with two young kids is much more of a limitation on my ability to earn a PhD or even MBA than any inate degradation.
A lot of people would salivate at the opportunity to become a Googler. Some of us actively shoo away the recruiters. To each their own, but I would have made the same choice.
For the most part a software engineering job at google is pretty mediocre from a coding perspective. Most people hired there will never work on cutting edge tech. For the enlightened few its amazing. This is speaking strictly about the work, and not the money/prestige/perks.
It’s almost always better to achieve for yourself instead of others. A PhD. is infinitely more valuable than a couple of years working for any company, especially if your subject is interesting enough to on-spot hire you before you finish.
And I say that as a manager who’s hired a lot of people before they earned X because their work was interesting. I don’t do it anymore, as a rule, because it crushed a lot of those people with regret later and I have to live with that.
I went to a State school and got an economics degree, I started my career as a SQL-lackey for a B.I department in declining midwestern retailer, but I treated my career like graduate school insofar that I worked hard at it.
About 4 years after my first day of professional work, I started as a data scientist at a FANG. My team of 9 had 3 Ph.Ds (all science Ph. Ds). As I understood it, the Ph.Ds do receive higher compensation but it's not that much more (~18% higher base) and if I really kick butt, I can out earn them with bonuses.
But I think my path was much easier and lucrative. I was able to save ~$100k, I had a standard of living above that of a regular graduate student and I had flexibility that they would dream of. I made 4 years worth of contacts of my profession, I
I'm sure some Ph.Ds are worth it as investments, but if you're interested in renumeration, get working.
Why did it crush them? Shouldn't the job they agreed to take with you have set them up for success? Or did they not perform well and find themselves unemployed?
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. Once we did they left the room (Dugan's 2nd right hand man at the time and another) & 3 minutes later showed us the door saying the "race is on."
They have since been awarded patents for audio syncing across phones.
Many here will say that's just how Silicon Valley works.... takes advantage and stomps on the little guy innovators & their dreams. That's not professional and I met with many other companies like Samsung who acted with the utmost respect & professionalism towards us. Yet, Google whose motto is "Don't Be Evil," can't act in the same fashion?
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 Apple/Xerox thing, or something?
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.
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Why do elite decision makers, CEO's, boards of directors, make decisions that will certainly have adverse effects, that will literally kill people (eg. Trafigura), just to make more profit? Despite the fact that they are all already individually multi-millionaires and could not really materially improve their lives with more money?
I've ruminated on this.
I think the only reason that could explain such excess is competitiveness. To them, it is like a game. Its not about getting another yacht, its about beating the other guy. I think its the same mechanism that will drive someone to grind for many hours in an MMO or suchlike.
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>>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.
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One word: greed!
”For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, for which some have strayed from the faith in their greediness, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.” I Timothy 6:10
Money. And money. And pathological drive to win.
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Seeing that Apple didn’t steal anything from Xerox. It was very much a negotiation so what lesson would that be?
https://zurb.com/blog/steve-jobs-and-xerox-the-truth-about-i...
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They get big and go public. Only a matter of time before the bad behavior starts to happen. Gotta keep that stock price up.
Not saying private companies can't engage in heinous shenanigans either, they sure can.
White collar sociopathy. These guys at the top lack an empathetic intuition.
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
You are a Nice Guy (TM) but business is business
it's actually not a bad thing that it's one of the few places you can actually be an asshole without feeling bad for it though
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Wow that's crazy. I didn't know they did stuff like that.
Also I didn't know Google had patents for syncing audio across phones. I wonder if any of the mobile apps (like AmpMe [1]) have to pay some license fees.
I once spent an evening researching the different apps that could sync audio across multiple devices [2]. I also wanted to build my own app, so tried to see if it would be possible (only if you have a jailbroken phone.) I just wanted to play the same audio on two pairs of AirPods. I found out that the Samsung Galaxy S9 has a Dual Audio feature, and the iPhone X can theoretically support this with Bluetooth 5.0. And the AmpMe app can sync audio across multiple phones. (I was also really surprised to find out that they're a pretty huge company with 20 full time employees.)
[1] https://www.ampme.com
[2] https://www.evernote.com/l/ACo7ItT-pItKkZoYf0YJy0raGhN5255FR...
> AmpMe app can sync audio across multiple phones. (I was also really surprised to find out that they're a pretty huge company with 20 full time employees.)
The owner is a sketchy guy that made his money using adware (and still is) named Wajam.
I guess AmpMe is what he hope will be his legit way to make money. Until it happens, it's probably bleeding money and is founded by his adware company.
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I mean I don't have any context, but surely this is a similar technology they have implemented with their Google Home speaker system?
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Cool ours syncs audio on any IP device..desktop, laptop, tablets, phones, IOT devices, whatever
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This is (one of the reasons) why you sign NDAs before discussing your technology.
A mutual NDA was signed as seen here https://ryanspahn.com/motorola-google-Expired-NDA2013.pdf.
We started SpeakerBlast in March 2013 & were meeting with Google in April 2013. We filed a provisional before the meeting & have a patent in the patent office.
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Useless. Savvy inventors get at least a provisional patent application on file before meeting with predatory companies like goog, ms, intel, etc.
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In retrospect why on Earth did we ever think a company whose motto was "Don't Be Evil" wouldn't be? It's like meeting someone who introduces themselves with, "Hi I'm John and I am definitely not planning to rape you to death and wear your skin as a mask."
“Don't be evil"? Let's see if there's an uproar by Google employees this time. My bet is on "fat chance".
Considering all the other corporate strategies Google employees have taken a public stand on lately, I wouldn't be surprised if there were serious fatigue on both ends - on corporate, for dealing with the constant rebellions killing major revenue sources (ex:- project maven's death being the end of any more government contracts); and for employees, who are likely sick of protesting an endless stream of obviously bad stuff while risking career alienation (ex:- dragonfly).
What's not immediately publicly evident is the opportunity cost vis a vis attrition and new hires - how many people have left from disillusionment? How many prospective employees are actively shunning Google directly because of these policies? (While a number might provide explicit feedback to recruiters about their reasons to reject, it's probable a silent majority is silently avoiding all contacts from Google recruiting.) At least personally speaking, I had a vastly more positive view of google around 2012 when I started grad school (more or less my dream company to work for at the time) than what I had when graduating (sufficient to decline any recruiting requests).
Reminds me of an episode of silicon valley where they write some of their implementation on a rival company whiteboard.
Didn’t they spoof this in the Silicon Valley series?
Yes. Season 2, part of the Homicide Energy Drink plot-line. EndFrame lures PP into a meeting, ostensibly to discuss funding, but instead brain rapes[1] PP.
1 - Erlich's term, not mine.
Thank you for sharing your experience and backing up the original post; this is something I will remember should the opportunity to work with anyone associated with ATAP come up.
I'm pretty sure I've seen this on Silicon Valley. Have been telling people who don't work in IT that it's pretty much a document from season one, and they refuse to believe me.
document -> documentary?
Wasn't there a Silicon Valley (the HBO show) episode about something similar?
Ah, found the episode: Season 2 Episode 2, "Runaway Devaluation".
> Google whose motto is "Don't Be Evil," can't act in the same fashion?
may be that's why they change it with doing right things (for own purpose) - https://bgr.com/2015/10/04/google-dont-be-evil-alphabet/
I thought they dropped the "Don't Be Evil" motto a long time ago.
That sounds downright awful.
This is a theft. They should be in prison.
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 big some of its people will be assholes because some people are assholes.
Google has been through several CEOs and is a publicly traded company with the latter meaning that it's subject to market pressure and activist investors. It's also a company large enough and relevant enough to be a "national security" interest, making it likely subject to government and intelligence infiltration, pressure, and micromanagement.
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But Samsung isn't an SV company, so it's to be expected.
Nightmares.
Certain actors have been getting away with murder for over a decade now. We have a few lucky first movers that have become alpha predators and are now stifling innovation. I can't really see any rational argument for this type of behavior benefiting our society or market at all - beyond religious adherence to the free market or if Google is working exclusively with your political party (wink wink). Hopefully regulators wake up in the near future - societies that don't protect entrepreneurs won't have any.
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.
bUt bUt...ChInA dOeS iP tHeFt
We've banned this account for using HN primarily for ideological battle.
Also for repeatedly posting flamebait and ignoring our requests to stop.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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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
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18567771
She worded that way too diplomatically.
What google did here is one of the evilest things you can do.
They are taking open research and trying to close it off. Research that they didn't even contribute to! Research that they didn't need patent rights for because it's already free for them to use. But they can't allow anyone after them to have the same privilege can they?
These are just some of the reasons patents are fundamentally broken and the patent system as a whole should be scrapped. Another big issue is that, like most any law, enforcing it costs significant money, and that cost scales depending upon who your opponent is. The cost for a little guy to enforce a patent claim against google is vastly out of proportion to the cost of google to enforce a patent claim against a little guy. This means that the patent system ends up being another form of regulatory capture used to squash competition. If we just removed patents, major corporations would be just as free as today to steal from the little guys, but at least they couldn't then weaponize their patents to crush the original inventors.
Not just patents, but all intellectual property. Copyright is arguably even more broken, lasting a century or more. It's ridiculous. My disdain for the DMCA is immeasurable, and the upcoming EU directive looks even worse.
Not only are these systems broken in their implementation, but there is little evidence that even in their most pure form they accomplished their supposed intention.
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How many patents the group or each employee gets awarded per year is probably one of their employee metrics (as in one application per X months). It's not surprising that someone would grab at low hanging fruit or develop unethical methods like that to fulfill performance requirements. It's probably not the first time the group did that.
"You get what you incentivize..."
Google ATAP did similar to me as I noted above...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18567672
Maybe. Or maybe the conversation spurred some new idea in the same general field, and that’s what they were trying to patent. This post doesn’t say anything about what the claims were actually directed to.
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 is punishable under section 1001 of title 18 by fine or imprisonment of not more than 5 years, or both."
So... How is this not literally a crime?
Would set a good example now this has come to light and especially since they tried to include the author as inventor. Proves they knew they were not the inventors.
This. Google should also probably take disciplinary actions.
You are kidding right? They even encourage it by making you sign a visitor agreement so that you have no right to the IP you discuss.
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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?
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I hope someone makes an example out of them.
Even without that specific law, it should fall under fraud.
Let us not forget when Google tried to patent an algorithm for Assymetric Numeral Systems developed by an academic scientist with intent of making it available in a public domain. Seems like this kind of practice is more common with Google than one might think.
Here are some articles about that: https://www.inquisitr.com/4935898/google-accused-of-trying-t... https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/08/after-patent-office-re...
And a HN link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14751977
Did 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.
Unless you've been visiting other offices from the one I've been visiting, the agreement pretty much says:
* No taking photographs or video without permission.
* Don't disclose things you see in the office outside the office
It's literally 3 sentences, and they have handy little icons next to each.
I see nothing about IP rights assignment or anything of the sort.
But different companies use different forms of visitor NDA — and lawyers purely love to load up contract forms with "protective" language to show how knowledgeable they are. This can be dangerous to counterparties; Stanford, in effect, lost part-ownership of a patent for HIV diagnostic testing because a Stanford investigator signed a visitor NDA that included IP-assignment language [0]. The case went all the way to the (U.S.) Supreme Court (about a tangential statutory issue).
The lesson: Always RTFA before signing it (where the A stands for the agreement), because sadly there's no such thing as an accepted, named standard.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_University_v._Roche_M...
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Same experience here, perhaps there's a different agreement for social visits and commercial meetings.
> Did you read Google's visitor agreement. You give up some IP rights by signing that.
Curious if you remember the wording/page number on the visitor agreement? It'll help people to be on the lookout when they visit Google.
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).
> Did you read Google's visitor agreement. You give up some IP rights by signing that.
I guess the "don't be evil" thing is already well down the toilet.
What's that all about? A new form of tribute when you're called upon to kiss Google's ring?
You skipped over the interesting bit: "they just give you a badge that said you didn't sign".
I'm pretty sure all companies do similar.
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Do you need to sign in blood, or is blue ink ok?
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 different. But it doesn't work that way.
There was an application that I worked on. I figured out all of the hard technical problems as the lead developer. Then when the guy got funding he kicked me off of the project, hired his friends, and filed a patent. He was "nice enough" to put my name on it but not as an assignee. Meaning I could never own any of the hard work I did.
This is the type of thing that reminds me that the idea that we really even have a civilization is a myth. Everything is just a game where the people who start with the biggest advantages and stoop low enough for the best scams come out on top.
It's a jungle out there, one of the hard realizations of getting older. Can try not to play along, but then you'll just be more screwed. :/
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.
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.
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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
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.
The good news is that very few people are at the top. Most are in the middle, and it's entirely possible to be ethical and in a good middling position.
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Also, you don’t get to be the head of an organization whose primary goal is to figure out better and more efficient ways of mass murdering people whilst having any semblance of a moral compass, either.
It does increasingly feel this way, but I think (hope?) it's selection bias. In other words we hear about the psychopaths because they are newsworthy. We don't generally hear about the average CEO, because they are average and generally follow expected social norms.
At least, that's what I hope.
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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.
Disclaimer: I am a Google employee, who isn't listed as inventor on any patents here. I don't speak for Google and all the usual blah blah.
In my experience outside of Google, typically how this works is that you will get a visit from product counsel asking if you have any patent-able work. It's not your job to ask if it's novel enough; that's the patent lawyers job.
So they bug you for months while you are trying to get work done asking about what you are working on and how it works, and then file something on your behalf. I can't recall if I even needed to sign anything before a provisional application was filed.
The way that this is pitched is that it's a necessary evil. One needs a huge patent portfolio to protect your tech inventions, because when you are sued, you can leverage your portfolio to protect yourself. I hate this system and how it works, but it is a business reality.
I don't know Regina, but I think Hanlon's razor applies. It less likely that she woke up one day and said, "well, I want to steal other people's inventions today!", than, "oh I have a bunch of work to do and need to get counsel off my back."
It doesn't make what happened here right, but I think it's unfair to assume malice.
No reason to take what is not yours, there is no room here to justify such even if the system is broken.
“It’s a necessary evil”
Company motto: “Don’t be evil”
Do you notice the hypocrisy here?
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>"I have a bunch of work to do and need to get counsel off my back"
You would have had a hell of a lot more work to do if you'd actually come up with the ideas you patented yourself, instead of stealing somebody else's bunch of work they did.
>It doesn't make what happened here right, but I think it's unfair to assume malice.
I'll probably burn some Hacker News points here but the old adage needs to be updated. Never attribute to stupidity or malice what can be attributed to both stupidity and malice.
The same Wikipedia article that mentions a Wired article of potential conflict of interest when working for the US goverment and awarding a contract for a company she owned stock in. Totally sounds like a non-corrupt human.
> She has an impressive resume.
> Why would she do something like this?
Because the latter may be the reason for the former
As a result of many real world experiences I've started to see ridiculously impressive looking resumes as a contrarian indicator.
When I see a resume that cites multiple company foundings, dozens of patents, dozens of projects, etc. I know the person is either stealing or taking credit for others work or just padding their resume in the more conventional sense. It says this person is a liar, exaggerator, narcissist, or sociopath.
It's simply not physically possible for a human being to do the amount of stuff I see on some resumes/CVs. There are not enough hours in a day to actually invent (as in actually conceptualize, research, and prove) a hundred things in 20 years or found (as in actually shepherd to success) dozens of companies. Founding one successful company takes several years and a ridiculous amount of work. Founding two or three in a life time is possible but off the charts impressive and the number of people who can realistically claim this are few. Dozens? Physically impossible, but I've seen such things claimed... by people whom I later saw were total liars and sociopaths.
Edit: it's different if they accurately claim to have managed people who have done these things, like "managed a research organization with over 200 patents and 1000 publications" or "founded company X and also contributed as an advisor to companies Y and Z" etc. It's also important to note authorship positions in long lists of publications since some science teams add everyone who ever touched a project as an author. Being listed on a bunch of publications with 15 authors is not a contrarian indicator, but claiming to be a primary researcher on absurd numbers of things can be.
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Probably because she’s been doing it to lots of people for her whole career. People don’t usually get caught the first time they shoplift.
> She has an impressive resume.
Does she? Or does she just have an impressive patent portfolio cribbed from others' work?
Or, in fairness, did this not happen as told because there's another side to the story?
They thought they could get away with it.
Someone needs to add this incident to her Wikipedia page.
Not saying it's not Wikipedia material, but perhaps a site nice and searchable site of misdeeds so we won't forget? Does something like this already exist?
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Agreed. If you’re an asshole let’s make sure some shit you do sticks to your name.
Since it is original research it will get thrown out in a minute.
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To be fair we can't be sure that she was personally involved or had knowledge of the patent application.
>> She has an impressive resume.
>> Why would she do something like $badthing?
Am I the only one wondering why anyone would think a person's resume should be any kind of predictor of good or bad behaviour?
You're not the only one wondering that.
In fact, one way to get an impressive resume is to railroad others and use people as stepping stones to your way to the top.
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I assume that statement has less to do with good behavior and more to do with doing something that can bite you in the ass when you have so much to lose.
Julian Assange did culture shifting work with Wikileaks, but allegedly sexually assaulted 2 women.
Adrian Peterson is possibly the best running back to ever play in the NFL, but has recently admitted that he still beats his children.
Steve Jobs created products that advanced how we use technology in our every day lives by leaps and bounds, but by all accounts was cruel to his daughter.
People can achieve amazing, important things in their professional life, but it's no indication that they're good people.
But this is not a matter of personal vs professional life. What she did was on a professional capacity. Not really comparable to all the examples you gave.
Inside most companies there is pressure to get a few patents.
At promotion time, people will ask 'if you've been researching $thing for 3 months, why haven't you patented anything yet?'.
That's hilarious. 3 months is far too short of a time to actually invent anything meaningful and get far enough along with it to determine whether it would actually be worth patenting.
It’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 my lawyer to contact you with our NDA process” or if you’re really worried “fuck off”.
It’s probably better to file patent first though. The patent is what you need to sell them.
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 just the claims that the misconduct occurred in: https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s2016.html
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.
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Yes, failure to include an inventor of a single claim invalidates the patent family.
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Designing am organization and keeping it running well are incredibly difficult. What you see as encouraging poor behavior could easily be poor management. I have never worked at Google so I do not know.
It can also result in attorney discipline.
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 cynical mind to even think of patenting something like an electronics-integrated storybook. This is not a remotely new idea (story/picture books with embedded electronics have been around for decades), and there’s no fundamental innovation at the root of these patents. This is just the worst impulses of VC culture out of control.
The bonuses are actually not that large. The real motivation is to have patents to put into your promo packet to help you the next time you apply for promotion.
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
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> It’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.
How the organisations react to that bad apples is what matters. I have seen companies ruined by half a dozen people that bully others, play office politics and blame games. Most of the people were fantastic, but the CEO will do nothing about this bullies in high positions.
If a company has no way of dealing with these people, the company does not deserve to survive. So, yes there are bad apples. But, the companies have the tools to make them correct their behaviour or get rid of them.
> It’s probably better to file patent first though.
Yes. Completely agree. Companies should play nice, but you should protect yourself just in case.
I'm amazed at how relaxed their response is. If I told someone about some of my work and then found out they'd tried to patent it, I would be pissed!
Yeah, like wtf?
>they offered to add me as an inventor on the patent application if it meant the applications could stand. I said no
That offer alone should be enough to can the whole thing.
Probably wouldnt ring nice for MIT to go to war with google
Interestingly enough in the hierarchy of power in that context, MIT has more than Google.
MIT is free standing when it comes to their finances. They have a $16.4 billion endowment. So Google (etc) doesn't have economic leverage over them, such that MIT always needs money and can't afford to ever cross large organizations.
If you get three or four of the better schools together in the conflict, Google would beg forgiveness. They desperately need access to the best those schools have to offer, and they know it. That access and relationship is worth more than gold or pride to them. Money? They've got so much they have no idea what to do with it. Get cut out of critical relationships with elite schools and that can take enough of your edge away over time that you start losing in subsequent competitive rounds of don't be killed by tech inflection.
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If you want your secrets to remain secret, you shouldn’t divulge your secrets.
There were no secrets here. This was work, which was publicly published and promoted, which a third party then tried to not only plagiarize but also to lock others out of using.
I'm from a scientific background. Plaigarism is the most serious allegation you can level against someone. This is a whole 'nother level.
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 patent is worth defending. In this case, she was able to demonstrate prior art, meaning that a patent could not be granted since they have no idea to protect since it's been in the public domain (i.e. released to the world) and not an original/non-trivial idea. This is why academic publication, or in the past the use of laboratory journals, are useful in documenting time of the invention.
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There is a big difference between open research that you don't want Google to lock away behind a patent and 'secrets'. Her ideas weren't secret, she just didn't want Google to own the patent to it.
The story in the article about Jill MacKay stealing their LED sticker idea then trying to sell them the patent for $5m is infuriating. Goes to show you can get scammed by some jeweler in Colorado just as fast and easily as by huge Corp like Google.
I suppose it's possible she had the idea, saw their kickstarter then submitted a patent to CYA. But then why back the kickstarter? Just feels fishy.
Probably the same reason some major companies (FTSE250/Fortune 500) do the same thing. It's called a "competitor product teardown" - the goal is to identify things your competitors are doing, whether they're patented, and whether you can do the same thing (or something similar) to improve your own product.
It's basically the BigCo Inc. version of "that's a great idea, I'm glad I thought of it". (and usually patented it too)
That makes me sick. What a disgusting parasite. And you don’t see anything condemning her actions. I wish that was the first result when you search her filthy name. Would hopefully impact her jewelry business.
Similar story and time as Google ANS patent: https://arstechnica.com/features/2018/06/inventor-says-googl...
Duda might have won this one https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/08/after-patent-office-re...
It was sad to read the thread where Jarek Duda introduces himself to the WebM codec developers group and suggests using Asymmetric Numeral Systems for VP9 / AV1.
Then he notices patent applications about his algorithm and asks Google to help: "Maybe Google could help fighting with it?"
It seems that Google helped by patenting it themselves??? So sad.
https://groups.google.com/a/webmproject.org/forum/#!topic/co...
I'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 progress was being made.
Correlation != 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
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.
So we are really to believe that Google would have offered to include them on the patent application if they would have developed it independently?
edit: there are many other stories were Google behaved unethically around patent applications.
Now interviewing at Google is not only an exercise in futility and alienation, you can also have your ideas stolen as part of it.
Good to know
Not in any supporting this, but likely what happened was:
a. some googlers met Leah for casual/interview talk
b. Leah describes her ideas in detail
c. Said Googlers steal her idea and patent it thinking 2 years is long time
d. Leah comes to know and Google is caught with hand in cookie jar
This is very Google should have practiced the do no evil. Instead they tried to salvage the situation.
Software 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 agreements which would force them to do so, since doing so would undermine their prospects with future employers, who believe in free and open software and unencumbered computer science research.
Not just software patents. All patents. What makes software industry so special?
Software is also protected by copyright.
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Is this even a software patent?
No, but it's Google's love of software patents that is spilling over into everything else, like popup books.
This isn’t a software patent.
And anyway, lots of methods get patented. If it’s new and nonobvious, why should the fact that it runs on a computer matter?
Reminds me of this cartoon:
https://dilbert.com/strip/2006-05-06
First place I worked for had something like that except it was a supposed new customer that took their technical sales documentation and gave them to a competitor to develop a competing system. They also sent two of the competitors engineers to training sessions.
[cartoon about interviewing an engineer to solve a product design problem]
Dang, it's incredible that google didn't fire the "inventors" listed on the patent. This is blatant stealing.
Why would they fire somebody for following company's policy?
It may actually be criminal.
I've been named an inventor on several patents. If I read the applications, I hardly recognize the 'art' we invented. Somehow the legalese gets derailed, or they asked somebody else (not me) to help describe it. Anyway, the patent and the idea (software organization) are hardly recognizable as related.
Note: I did not instigate the patent process. The company lawyers did. I extricated myself from the process early.
Patents must be abolished.
Recommended reading: https://www.amazon.com/Against-Intellectual-Monopoly-Michele...
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 a benefit to society instead of a harm?
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>And replaced with?
Nothing. Industry secrets is a far better model than giving major corporations access to government power that they can use to crush smaller competition, sometimes for work that they stole from the smaller competition.
You may be underestimating the sheer pressure to file patents at big tech firms. Some companies have annual filing quotas, not just for patent attorneys, but also for engineers. Not filing enough patent applications may negatively affect your performance review.
I've had patent attorneys show up on a Friday afternoon with a case of beer, to get the entire team to sit in a room and brainstorm patents. Anything goes - doesn't matter if they relate to the field you work in, since the broader company works in almost every field.
As an employee, you are specifically forbidden from googling patents, because you might become aware of prior art. As long as you aren't aware... the reasoning goes that it isn't strictly-speaking illegal.
I can't say I'm surprised that cultures like that result in the sort of thing you experienced.
I'm not knowledgeable enough to talk about patents and corporations and prior art, but I did want to mention that that tech is really neat. As the parent of young kids, the intersection of storytelling, education and technology is fascinating to me, especially in the era of Youtubers and Netflix and other passive experiences.
Kudos for creating something engaging and interesting.
If the author pops in here, I hope he takes a look at this patent, because it might be prior art: https://patents.google.com/patent/US8512151 I complained about it to the "Stupid Patent of the Month" attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (here: https://www.eff.org/issues/stupid-patent-month) and got a nice response agreeing that it looks obvious.
I think the author is a she.
True, but I didn't see that she identified herself, or her gender, in the article. So what's a commenter to do? That's an honest question. Mangle to use "they"? Use some genderless pronoun that'll piss off x% of readers?
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I used to work in the online slot machine business and saw some of the patents related to slots. Most of them seemed trivial but it did affect how we could design our games. Certain features of the reels bouncing or paylines being awarded were patented. There were other ideas like connecting players to each other that seemed like they shouldn't be patent-able.
With that perspective, this board game patent actually looks very good. It certainly isn't an idea that I've thought of before or seen.
I have heard (so very anecdotal, not confirmed), but similar stories from folks who worked with Google (not for Google).
Google would reach to incumbent telephone/infrastructure companies and tell them that they want to use their services for some super project. To get well integrated, Google, of course need to know the details/idiosyncrasy of the existing protocols/work around conventions/etc.
So Google employees would receive all the documentation, knowledge/know-how that they could extract.
Then the project would get 'cancelled'. And then, some time later, the 'service provider' would find that Google is implementing similar capabilities that their service is providing, only as part of their some other global initiative that aims at converting majority of infrastructure services to Google.
Perhaps these stories are a reflection of the internal culture characteristic of the 'Do-more-swindle' company.
I see people below recommend NDA/etc. Sure, but US/UK legal system is heavily tilted towards who can hire better lawyers -- and the monopolies win there easily....
Tossing this out - lost the comment this was a reply to:
I'm not sure about that - my N=1
I went to a State school and got an economics degree, I started my career as a SQL-lackey for a B.I department in declining midwestern retailer, but I treated my career like graduate school insofar that I worked hard at it.
About 4 years after my first day of professional work, I started as a data scientist at a FANG. My team of 9 had 3 Ph.Ds (all science Ph. Ds). As I understood it, the Ph.Ds do receive higher compensation but it's not that much more (~18% higher base) and if I really kick butt, I can out earn them with bonuses.
But I think my path was much easier and lucrative. I was able to save ~$100k, I had a standard of living above that of a regular graduate student and I had flexibility that they would dream of. I made 4 years worth of contacts of my profession, I
I'm sure some Ph.Ds are worth it as investments, but if you're interested in renumeration, get working.
I was assigned as an inventor for a bullshit patent application our legal team did not even understand. I did everything I could to undermine it. The whole system is fucked and is all about who has more money for lawyers (who know fuck all about the matters at hand)
Google really pushes their employees to patent everything they can. During the brief time I worked there, we had multiple "patent brainstorm" meetings where we'd sit in a room and try to come up with things we could patent based on what we were working on. On top of that, they pay you a decent sum of money (low thousands, forget the exact number) for filing patents. I knew one guy who worked with various teams to file dozens of patents a year and almost doubled his salary.
That said, none of the people I knew at Google would blatantly steal other people's ideas. This sounds like a very unethical cluster of employees.
Here are details of the patents filed: https://patents.justia.com/inventor/ali-javan-javidan
Had this already 3 times that interviewers ask me out about their Engineering problems, and how I would solve them. Initially I got good or very good feedback but then afterwards was rejected. It feels weird, also if I consider that they might do this with every person interviewed. Crowdsourcing knowledge through interviews, yay ;)
Seems far more appropriate to get toy problems, if that is needed at all, or to get scoped problems but then get reimbursed if it takes several hours.
when i was younger i was interviewing at SomeStartup(tm) in Austin TX. I had a really good conversation with their VP of Engineering, a genuinely nice guy who cared about his people. The last step in the interview was an assignment to write a fairly specific caching system. I hacked on it for a couple hours and got it working per their requirements, demo'd it, handed back the laptop, and everyone liked my work. After that, radio silence. I wonder if I got fooled into solving a problem for them. Granted, that particular problem has been solved a hundred times over so i doubt it. Regardless, i've always wondered what the real story was there. Maybe they were just being polite.
I don’t think there’s bad intent here, just a case of the interviewer wanting to offer up a challenge and taking the one that is top of mind.
True...
https://www.quora.com/Do-any-companies-give-a-bonus-for-pate...
> Google paid generously for filing patents to help create a defensive portfolio.
> ...you would receive $1000 post-tax per person, up to $3k total
> I left Google in 2009 and the program may have changed since then.
(The events took place in 2014)
Silicon Valley S02E02 Brain Rape
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlwwVuSUUfc
Can't read the article (in the air, data constrained).
But if you have what you think is a patentable invention, file a provisional application before you interview. The USPTO gives you a filing receipt, which might help here. Let your interviewer know you can talk about your invention because you've got a patent pending. It costs $70 to file as a micro entity. See Nolo Press for a good resources on how to do it.
Google is a new patent troll, IMO. Another example: Google trying to patent compression algorithm already dedicated to public domain by its inventor
https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/9c7kw6/google_i...
I'm really not surprised or upset. Its not like Google is known for using patents to crush others. The patent system is fucked up enough that they have to try to patent everything they work on and hope to either get the patent, or as in this case, prove its unpatentable through prior art.
Its a fucked up system but I don't think its as sinister people are making it out to be.
I have often thought... "I have an idea; If I search using Google, and not really find anything relevant, does 'google' ever look at everyones 'ideas' and 'send these off to the labs to investigate further for possible patents? How would you ever know?
I'm putting on my tin-hat now!
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?
This is awfully scummy. I'd seen it in Silicon Valley (the show) and I laughed then; seeing it play out in real life is sobering.
If you want to understand Silicon Valley, watch "Silicon Valley" - Bill Gates
There was a thread on HN exactly about this last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18488520
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.
What you describe is the standard in some industries. If a research team discovers something new, lawyers will make a patent out of it that is broad / vague enough to prevent any further research in that area by competitors. At the same time they look at the patents of competitors and if they are too specific they try to patent similar ideas.
> If a research team discovers something new, lawyers will make a patent out of it that is broad / vague enough to prevent any further research in that area by competitors.
Not quite right. If an inventor creates something marginally useful at a large company, there's no question that their lawyers will try to patent it. But the purpose is not to prevent research in the area, in fact the opposite. Once a company has a patent on something, they'd likely encourage further research, knowing that they have a financial interest in the research going to market.
All big companies do this, and once the research matures enough to become a product, all the companies have modest claim to it, but they all have an interest to bringing it to market. In some cases, these companies fight who gets what in court (e.g., CRISPR), but in others, they come together and agree on a royalty scheme roughly proportional to their contributions (e.g., MPEG, H.264).
The point is, no company patents something to stop research on that thing, it's quite the opposite.
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.
Wouldn't conventional publication achieve the same thing?
How much does such a strategy cost?
Just publish a white paper.
It bothers me when there’s no author or timestamp on an article.
See the end of the article, not the top.
She added that, probably in response to my comment and others like it.
The intended conclusion isn't explcitly stated, so: private sharing enables this danger; public sharing prevents it, aka publishing.
If only it were that easy. The largest cloud company has a core component of their strategy monetization of open source. I haven’t heard them paying royalties to the people that developed the software.
Why anyone can still stand up for Google as a company is beyond me. They are just scum who got a foothold on the internet at the right time.
Any Googler who is willing to comment on this here ?
They only show up in threads praising Google as a utopia.
What are the open-source licenses that would prevent someone from patenting my ideas?
(or if a shorter list, what are the licenses that wouldn't?)
I wonder if a first line of defense could be to license the work as AGPL. Google would then probably not use it AFAIK
Wont prevent them from trying https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/08/after-patent-office-re...
Did the offer any moral or ethics explanation? How did they justify this on a human level? That always interests me about this sort of decision, surely they had many meetings on the topic, what would those minutes look like?
This sort of thing keeps me up at night as we shop for investors for our saas product. They have the money to just implement our ideas and what we show them from our beta, and most of them are in the same general space.
How is this thread at the bottom of the front page with 1535 votes and only 15hs?
Google brigade?
I'm curious if this idea is that unique -- The Exploratorium published a book called "The Art of Tinkering" in 2014 that has paper circuits that seem very similar to the authors concept.
That's the author's point -- she was working in a field where there was plenty of active work going on, but after meeting with google, the big G tried to patent it.
Well, if the Exploratorium published a book using paper circuits before Google applied for the patent, is this prior art?
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>An inventor is the one credited with coming up with the idea for an invention. The assignee actually gets the legal rights to the patent.
I assumed there was something like that but interesting to see it drawn out.
30 years ago, I implemented pie menus at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab, and the UMD Office of Technology Liaison wanted me to patent them, but I decided not to, and I don't regret it. The patent would have been assigned to a little patent trolling company that UMD has a parasitic relationship with, and very little of the money would have ever found its way back to me or the University.
https://medium.com/@donhopkins/pie-menus-936fed383ff1?source...
But that's not the worst problem patenting pie menus would have caused:
If I'd patented them, it would have effectively prevented me from using them myself in subsequent proprietary and open source projects, like The NeWS Toolkit, TCL/Tk, The Sims, SimCity, Unity3D, etc.
Convincing Sun or Electronic Arts or any other employer or client to license a patented user interface interaction technique instead of using an inferior freely available one would have been a non-starter, as would have been using it in any open source projects.
It was only because I didn't file a patent that I was able to freely implement pie menus for NeWS at Sun, and use them in SimCity and The Sims.
You're not always going to be working for the same company or attending the same school for the rest of your life, so it's not a good idea to hand over all the rights to your ideas to them, because you'll have to pay if you ever want to use them again yourself. But if you give them away to everyone for free, you get to use them yourself after you leave, and they're free for everyone to use in open source projects.
>Open Sourcing SimCity: Chaim Gingold’s “Play Design” PhD Thesis: "Pie menus play a critical role in The Sim’s user interface design, dovetailing perfectly with the object and AI architecture. Objects advertise verbs to character AI, so it is natural for the verbs to be arranged in a radial menu about objects. I can’t imagine an alternate design that would have had the same widespread usability, and therefore appeal, without them. It is difficult to imagine The Sims without pie menus." -Chaim Gingold, Play Design PhD Thesis, Open Sourcing SimCity
https://medium.com/@donhopkins/open-sourcing-simcity-58470a2...
Unfortunately other people filed misleading patents around pie menus that should never have been granted, because they tried to retroactively redefine what pie menus were by ignoring published prior art, and coined a new term "marking menu" which they defined by a straw man comparison to their self-servingly gerrymandered misunderstanding of pie menus.
So they ended up patenting fictitious "differences" between "marking menus" and "pie menus" that weren't really differences: obvious features pie menus had always had, and that I'd written about and demonstrated in SIGCHI videos, but they'd conveniently ignored, because they needed to trick the patent office into thinking those properties were unique to "marking menus".
Then they misleadingly and systematically used those patents as FUD for decades in their marketing brochures, advertisements, and word of mouth from their sales people on trade show floors. They purposefully discouraged other companies like Kinetix and open source projects like Blender from doing anything remotely resembling pie menus, whether or not they actually infringed on their patents.
https://medium.com/@donhopkins/pie-menu-fud-and-misconceptio...
Huge Problem: Software Patents and FUD
Autodesk Advertisement About “Patented Marking Menus”: "Marking Menus. Quickly select commands without looking away from the design. Patented marking menus let you use context-sensitive gestures to select commands."
http://images.autodesk.com/adsk/files/aliasdesign10_detail_b...
There is a sad history of people using software patents to make misleading claims about obvious techniques that they didn’t originate, and constructing flawed straw man definitions of ersatz pie menus to contrast with their own inventions, to mislead the patent examiners into granting patents.
There is a financial and institutional incentive to be lazy about researching and less than honest in reporting and describing prior art, in the hopes that it will slip by the patent examiners, which it very often does.
[...]
The Alias Marking Menu Patent Discouraged the Open Source Blender Community from Using Pie Menus for Decades
Here is another example that of how that long term marketing FUD succeeded in holding back progress: the Blender community was discussing when the marking menu patent would expire, in anticipation of when they might finally be able to use marking menus in blender (even though it has always been fine to use pie menus).
As the following discussion shows, there is a lot of purposefully sewn confusion and misunderstanding about the difference between marking menus and pie menus, and what exactly is patented, because of the inconsistent and inaccurate definitions and mistakes in the papers and patents and Alias’s marketing FUD:
"Hi. In a recently closed topic regarding pie menus, LiquidApe said that marking menus are a patent of Autodesk, a patent that would expire shortly. The question is: When ? When could marking menus be usable in Blender ? I couldn’t find any info on internet, mabie some of you know."
stuff like this makes me so damn angry. It so scummy and is completely against the spirit of innovation and sharing.
Right from the 80s Microsoft playbook.
Google is also fetching ideas for code and patents from publicly streamed hackathons around the world.
at least they arent murdering people for the code, yet, afaik
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antitrust_(film)
If you think they aren’t trying to steal your ideas if you use their products you’re nuts.
What happened probably, interviewer wanted to credit himselve.
A company is made out of humans
Hi Everyone! This is Jie, the author of the original post on patentpandas.org. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and experiences on this thread! I thought it might be helpful for you all to know the full story and give some more context:
The original post is actually one of TWO patent-related issues that simultaneously happened to me.
The first one was when my crowdfunding campaign backer successfully patented our LED stickers product (https://patentpandas.org/stories/crowdfunding-backer-patente...) despite us having a successful crowdfund, lots of press, research papers dating back to 2011 and an entire business by then.
And then it was about a month after I found out about the LED stickers patent, I found out that Google ATAP was trying to patent work that I had shared during the job interview (https://patentpandas.org/stories/company-patented-my-idea).
While I can understand why the google story is getting more attention, in many ways it’s actually the other story that’s more problematic, because in that case, the faulty patent application actually passed muster at the USPTO and issued as a patent.
This all happened during my last year of grad school at MIT, in the months before I defended my thesis and graduated. And it absolutely sucked!
But in the end, I was pretty lucky that both situations turned out okay(ish). The most important bit was that I had support from all these law clinics, and my own giant institution (MIT), to help me navigate. But I can already see from this thread that many others out there aren’t so lucky.
The absurdity of these situations, and that they were happening to me at the same time, got me to spend the next couple years learning about patent law at the Berkman Klein Center (https://cyber.harvard.edu). My hope was that I could better understand how the heck all this happened, and to see if I could do something to help other creators out.
That’s why I started Patentpandas.org - to have a place to share these patent stories, to help by showing how others navigated their patent problems, and (for folks like my former self) to show that it’s not so scary to work with lawyers and wade into patent law! That’s also why we’re using panda comics to illustrate patent law concepts. Pandas: definitely not scary :)
My hope is that if more creators out there better understand patent law and are connected with pro bono lawyers when they need help, then patent trolls and others who have more legal resources at their disposal won’t be able to get away with things like this so easily.
BTW, I shared all this during my talk for the Patent Pandas launch last week. In case you’re curious to check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfCYOWVQehA
Thanks, Jie
Something very similar happened to me.
When I was at university studying CS I was running a Arduino fansite and a fansite for a videogame - both of whom made most of their money from affiliate revenue (a couple hundred bucks per month).
I thought it would be cool to work at Reddit (was close to graduating), and I had read blog posts from here and various other sites and IRC about how hiring managers liked projects.
I took to it to build a JS library that converted links to affiliate links, for example amazon and some other small retailers I had used.
Basically you just parse any URL you embed in the page with this library and it would convert the existing (non-affiliate) links to affiliate links with your signature attached so you got a revenue share.
In addition to this, I had done research on Reddit's traffics and crawled reddit to see how many affiliate-capable links existed. I talked about this in the interview and suggested they could make around 2 million per month if they hired me and used my script.
--> I was rejected after the interview, but a couple months later Reddit announced it was experimenting with a new feature that would re-write links as affiliate. They ended up implementing this feature that I am 95% sure I came up with and someone else stole.
It was one of the shittiest experiences I have ever had interviewing, especially since I didn't get a job out of it but I believe they have made millions off of this idea so far.
I huge put off, but I've learned since then backstabbing and stealing ideas is a big part of politics in most corporations. What a bummer.
Prior art VigLink (2010): https://techcrunch.com/2010/01/12/viglink-affiliate-programs...
Reddit partners with VigLink (2016): https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.reddit.com/r/announcements/...
Hope this helps you move on.
On the specific idea: The idea is not unique, and really low hanging fruit for a mass site.
Agreed. Not sure how long ago your interview was, but I remember seeing plug & play services that would add affiliate codes to links of any site via a JS snippet even 10 years ago. A friend who ran a blog network used it.
At the time, I could not find a single social media site that was using link-rewriting to make affiliate money.
Blogs and fan sites for niche products had been using this to make money for a while, social media sites had not yet tried it.
The close proximity with the announcement and my interview is what really bothered me. I have a strong feeling (but cannot prove) that someone I interviewed with took the idea and ran with it. I had done a lot of research into how much money Reddit would make off of this and how to implement it at scale without breaking existing affiliate links and such.
I had literally planned it as my pitch for what I wanted to work on and why they should hire me.
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Here's my HN submission of a demo I wrote of something in the same space back in 2010: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1908283
It wasn't a new idea then either. The founder of VigLink reached out to me then to share what they were working on.
It's not just corporations, it's companies and individuals in general. It has happened to me a lot.
Ironically, making my stuff open source has cut down a lot on that. (Github leaves a clear provenance trail.)
This is not a new idea, and Reddit would have tried it eventually. Giving up your ideas during a job interview is also pretty stupid. If you had a "$2 million month" idea, would you have been happy no matter what they paid you?
> I talked about this in the interview and suggested they could make around 2 million per month if they hired me and used my script.
Obviously I don't know how the rest of the interview went, but the way you put it in the retelling makes it sound a lot like it was distracting from all the other reasons to hire you.
"How about that two million guy?" - "We hire developers, not libraries"
It might have been that they not only picked up the idea from the interview, but on top of that also did not hire you because of misplaced conditions. If that part came over more like "you can't if you don't", then it would be seen as a challenge: "sure we can". I think that just telling them that you have previously worked on link monetization and wrote a library about it would have been a much better interview strategy than dangling some made up number in front of their faces. As an interviewer I would fear that a candidate arguing like that would be prone to taking their regular salary as granted and renegotiate something on top for every quantifiable contribution.
Oh god forbid an potential employee feels he has some power in this transaction.
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Alternatively maybe they had been working on the idea for awhile and it was just a coincidence. Bringing an idea to the table that they were already working on might also hurt your chances of getting a job there.
Why would that hurt your chances? Wouldn't they see that as a good thing?
In addition to what others have said, Reddit abandoned the idea of skimming affiliates shortly after announcing the plan. They have certainly not made millions.
Really sorry to hear that. I understood patenting can be a pain and takes an inventor to get it done, but it seems like the thieves are more interested in getting patented than the inventors themselves.
I guess the best thing for you to do it in such a situation is to open source it so the whole community can benefit from it, not just one big evil company that steals ideas. At least you'd go down as a hero.
Didn't Google try to do this with ANS also?
Addressing any shock and revulsion following this story:
Because capitalist organizations are literally founded upon the act of constant appropriation of the surplus value created by their own employees, it's not reasonable to expect these organizations to somehow indulge a higher standard of treatment toward outside persons who aren't even their employees, to persons who are just dropping by to share ideas and work. Such organizations will seize with both hands whatever of value is presented to them. They seize, that's what they do. All day, every day.
Just because you are giant, isn't it!
Don't be evil.
Oops
If you have to harm someone, is Google the best choice? Have they asked for moral opprobrium?
The situation certainly seems like it.
If 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...
Any man who must say, "I am the king" is no true king.
Also holds for someone saying "I'm intelligent" and "trust me".
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Howard Stern is the king of all media.
John 19:21, Then said the chief priests of the Jews to Pilate, Write not, The King of the Jews; but that he said, I am King of the Jews.
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"Work/life balance" really means you'll experience a "work/work balance"
This basically sums it up:
https://dilbert.com/strip/1998-05-05
So Computer Science is Engineering?
It's a thing of its own. Used to be called informatics in some countries. Much better name, IMO. There are large parts of computer science that have nothing to do with computers. They're about information and can be applied outside of computers.
I'm with Alan Kay when he says "computer science" used to be an aspiration and eventually became a misnomer. Same with software engineering.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyIQKBzIuBY
(Doesn't mean CS and SE are always "worse" than science and engineering. But they are currently very different.)
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> So Computer Science is Engineering?
Mostly, yes, especially as an undergrad. A science forms and tests hypotheses, usually about natural phenomena. I only had a few classes in CS where we tested any hypotheses or performed any real experiments. Most of it was design and learn by rote, and not experimentation.
Theoretic Computer Science is pretty sciencey but is testing things engineers built and often testing using math rather than experiment. Algorithms and data structures use the result of some science, but don’t teach or perform much science normally. Graphics involves a lot of cross-discipline physics and math, but in practice is teaching techniques and APIs, and doing very little scientific experimentation.
Machine learning may be bringing more science into computer science. People are certainly running lots of experiments in ML today trying to figure out how neural networks behave. A lot of it is still engineering too, of course, but there is some science in there.
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There's a good part of Computer Science that's like magic. Unfortunately there's a bad part of Computer Science that's like religion. - Hal Abelson
Some things in CS programs are engineering, other things are philosophy.
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computer science is math
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There are certain aspects of computer science that are engineering (i.e. concerned with the building of machines and structures), other that are a part of formal science, others that are a part of experimental science, ect.
Well, computer science is all about making stuff.
Only if you're good.
So we should start a country called the Totalitarian Empire of Evil and it would be a utopia? I'm in.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNhhz1yYk2U
I think the Satanists actually have this mindset. Seems like I'm frequently seeing headlines about them doing good works and stuff.
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It sounds like the bad apples were at Motorola and potentially Google got rid of them.
So what is neuroscience then
That's why it should just be under neurology.
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They did say "probably" not science, so this one is the exception
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>If your country has "democratic" in the name
"The United Democratic States of North America not including Canada" would be quite the name.
It would surely be
"The Federal Republic of the Democratic United States of America"
(I've been in Africa waaaaay too long :) )
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Leah 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
It's very interesting that she is launching the PandaPatents site using her story as the impetus to help people navigate patent law. I haven't had time to look at it, but it sounds like an interesting idea.
I hope this catches on - it looks like there's already a second good story on the HN frontpage, about patent issues with crowdfunding.
I'm always impressed at how big a difference it can make to go from "people know this is a problem" to "there's a central place to see what this problem looks like and how much damage it can cause".
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You’re not missing something obvious, like a byline. But the article does contain a screenshot of an email she says she sent to Google, with her name in the From field: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5af0d38a5417fc945678f...
Very likely. I can't quite make out the name on her badge. But she's with chibitronics.com it seems.
Edit: Doh. It's Jie Qi :)
Maybe the page was edited since your comment, but it says "Author: Jie Qi" at the bottom of the page.
There's a video embedded at the bottom, "Electronic Popables by Jie Qi": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AI-6wMlaVTc
The byline is at the end of the article and is indeed Jie Qi
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!
Headline says “Company”. Article says “Google”. Is this being softened in Google's favor?
I think it's the other way around? I don't know why the article says 'company' but we changed the HN headline to 'Google' after it was posted here last night.
yeah I didn't mean HN was softening it; the article itself was softening it.
And Adobe stole my hyper-layer management patents too. What's your point?
+$1k got invention disclosures? Ha, my company pays $150.
staying in school is the stupidest idea ever. No wonder Google wanted to screw you over
staying in school is the stupidest idea ever.
Google is evil.
This is not cool
jl;isdif.nvrvu;weo;nsz signed by linkedin.com/in/djordje-vasiljevic
> 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 obsolete within 5 years, this is LED books, which simply becomes more feasible as transistor sizes shrink and battery technology improves, perfect for a 20 year exclusivity period before falling into the public domain where it can be vastly more practical to create in 2033.
It does seem odd to stick with an intellectual property system that is so obviously deficient in it's stated purpose of "improving the useful arts and sciences". Current patent law amounts to a barrier to entry for most small potential competitors in any market where defensible IP is required. Big companies can cross-license or litigate around issues but small players are locked out of the markets they might want to compete in because the costs are prohibitive. Yet another example of the American system having failed to protect competition and encouraging cartelisation.
> [a] patent [keeps thhe project alive] too
> perfect for a 20 year exclusivity period
So for 20 years, if I wish to create and sell a book with transistors I have to license the idea from google (that is if they're even willing to give me a license)?
And somehow having to go through that legal loophole will keep the art of creating LED books alive? You seriously believe that?
Does the patent have complex details which would take longer than 20 years for someone to independently discover about creating LED books? If so, people do save time by waiting 20 years and then reading the patent, but that seems extremely unlikely.
> So for 20 years, if I wish to create and sell a book with transistors I have to license the idea from google (that is if they're even willing to give me a license)?
No. Google wasn't supposed to try and patent it.
I responded to a very specific piece of the article which seemed to ignore that patent applications functioning as prior art is available to subculture enthusiasts too.
The whole concluding paragraph was about making ideas that other people can build from, it wasn't about LED books in general. They want ideas to be available for others to build from but don't want others to patent it, ignoring that attempting to patent it yourself also fixes this, no matter how you actually use the patent or failed/abandoned application.
(Although, I'll concede that patenting is an expensive bet that not everyone would have the money or risk tolerance for.)
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> 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.)
Just a reminder that Google, or any company for that matter, has a fiduciary duty towards their shareholders to file a patent for everything they have learned about and that hasn't been patented yet.
There's a common myth that companies have "a fiduciary duty" to make as much money as possible (especially short-term), but this has no basis in law in the US.
https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/13-354.html "modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not do so... a for-profit corporation may take costly pollution-control and energy-conservation measures that go beyond what the law requires. A for-profit corporation that operates facilities in other countries may exceed the requirements of local law regarding working conditions and benefits. "
https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co... "companies that maximize profits by firing employees, avoiding taxes, selling shoddy products or polluting the environment can harm their shareholders more than helping them."
Thing is, if a CEO doesn't pursue profit and shareholder dividends above all else, they probably won't last long until the investors and board members vote them out.
>"companies that maximize profits by firing employees, avoiding taxes, selling shoddy products or polluting the environment can harm their shareholders more than helping them."
In which case are they really maximizing profits? Wouldn't it depend upon the risk and costs of those options verses their benefits?
It's like genetic algorithms that look like they don't work because someone miscalculated exactly what the fitness function was optimizing.
Filing a patent application for an idea you stole from another person is illegal (because you’re not the actual inventor, and the inventor oath you sign would be a lie).
Is this really the case? I know that Milton Friedman promoted this idea, but can pursuing some welfare at the cost of short-term profits be an offence?
I think it's time we all stopped listening to anything Friedman said.
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I and my friends had a similar experience too.
So now we are pointing fingers at Google every day? Are they the new Muslims or Russians?
It could just be people independently working on the same things, as is common in technology.
For the purpose of a patent, that doesn't help.
"Independent creation" is a valid defense for copyright, but not for patents.
Something cannot be patented if prior art exists before the filing of the patent. It doesn't matter if you knew about it. Even if you can prove that the prior art is not something you were aware of at the time you filed for a patent, your patent is invalid.
That's how patents are supposed to work; inventions must be "non-obvious" to the point where no one else has ever created it nor described it before on the entire planet.
If google knows that someone else has created such things (as they must have after said visit), the only responsible thing to do is not file a patent, regardless of if they independently worked on it.
>If google knows that someone else has created such things (as they must have after said visit), the only responsible thing to do is not file a patent, regardless of if they independently worked on it. //
A job interview is not a public disclosure and so doesn't count as prior art. So novelty is not affected.
However, the applicant must derive rights (employment, assignment) from the inventor in order to apply for a patent.
In UK IIRC S.13 of the Patents Act allows an inventor to file to be named as the inventor (or co-inventor) and for the patent to be reassigned accordingly.
Of course taking Google to court is going to be a hard slog.
> inventions must be "non-obvious"
Friend of mine is an engineer with a law degree that works on patents. What he said was not obvious doesn't really catch what's going on. He said a patent is really a set of answers to a set of questions. The answers are usually obvious when you know what the questions are, but what questions are and why they are significant isn't obvious. That's where the work is.
Utility patents protect how you do something not what you do.
There are innumerable ways to implement an electronic book each novel and non-obvious way could qualify for its own patent.
> “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.
The story talks about a patent. The search on the first listed inventor brings 5 of his applications on various aspects of these electronically enriched books all almost simultaneously (after he invented additive manufacturing) - Google I suppose have nice bonuses for patents and skillful patent layers.
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.
If a company wants to steal your patent they will "surround" your idea with other patents: method of manufacturing <idea>, method of using <idea> in <industry>, <idea> used in adjacent use case. This is a legal but slimy way to force the sale of your idea since now only they can profitably commercialize it.
> 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 that they were acting in bad faith.
OP was lucky to catch this before the patent was issued.
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
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On a certain level, it makes sense. Google wants to patent it to cover their bases and make sure no one else does the same thing and blocks them. It's a rational move in a shitty game.
"Rational move". Think about that for a second. Morally wrong doesn't really reach anyone's mind these days.
How would it look if someone else got the patent and completely blocked Google? It's not even a question for large companies. The issue is this archaic patent and copyright system where someone "owns" an idea... Absurd.
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Morals don't count for a whole lot if a patent trolls are also players in the game.
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If i can make money grinding babies into a fine powder, that is clearly the "rational move", nobody can fault me for it.
> I was even invited to share my work directly with Regina Dugan, the director of ATAP at that time! I was excited, thinking perhaps I would be invited for a summer internship. It turned out they found my work so relevant that they offered me a job on the spot.
> It was a tough choice: I had just started the first year of my PhD and would’ve had to take a leave from the program to pursue this project. After asking many people, the advice was clear: stay in school. So I decided to turn down the offer and continue pursuing my PhD.
...this sounds like terrible advice? I have to wonder whether any of the "many people" consulted weren't professors.
What makes this terrible advice? Is there something in particular about landing a job at Google that makes it objectively better in every value system than continuing with a PhD that one is already seeking?
I left a very good position on the table after my undergrad, in favor of pursuing a graduate degree. I weighed my options and decided that I would rather spend some years in my youth learning how to conduct research -- lessons I believed, and still believe, will carry through into my future endeavors. I picked up an excellent job after my Master's (at the same place I had left behind previously!) and am very happy with how things played out.
I realize this is the best possible outcome, but what makes this general arc such a bad idea?
> What makes this terrible advice?
Some PhD programs focus on non-marketable topics that don't help candidates develop marketable skills, and exist only to dump the research group's drudge work on an unsuspecting soul.
Wasting years of your life in a low-pay low opportunity dead-end job that's prone to abuse just to pursuit a pipe dream is not a great career move, particularly if the alternative is landing a job at Google.
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> I picked up an excellent job after my Master's (at the same place I had left behind previously!)
It sounds like you would agree that joining a PhD program is not a good idea.
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You can get an offer from Google many times if you are good, getting a PhD offer from MIT, even if you are good, won't come that many times.
An MIT Phd opens many doors in many areas and will do throughout your life. Trust me, you won’t always be young and you won’t always be interested in the same thing.
It shouldn’t be, but it is way more difficult to get high level professional qualifications when you’re older. The expectation that reaearch students are young is quite embedded.
How much is expectations vs the reality of life circumstances? I’m mid-40s and almost surely slightly slower in raw intellect than I was 20 years ago, but being married with two young kids is much more of a limitation on my ability to earn a PhD or even MBA than any inate degradation.
A lot of people would salivate at the opportunity to become a Googler. Some of us actively shoo away the recruiters. To each their own, but I would have made the same choice.
For the most part a software engineering job at google is pretty mediocre from a coding perspective. Most people hired there will never work on cutting edge tech. For the enlightened few its amazing. This is speaking strictly about the work, and not the money/prestige/perks.
There's a lot to a particular individual's situation and life goals to indicate whether the advice is bad or not (for them).
It’s almost always better to achieve for yourself instead of others. A PhD. is infinitely more valuable than a couple of years working for any company, especially if your subject is interesting enough to on-spot hire you before you finish.
And I say that as a manager who’s hired a lot of people before they earned X because their work was interesting. I don’t do it anymore, as a rule, because it crushed a lot of those people with regret later and I have to live with that.
I'm not sure about that - my N=1
I went to a State school and got an economics degree, I started my career as a SQL-lackey for a B.I department in declining midwestern retailer, but I treated my career like graduate school insofar that I worked hard at it.
About 4 years after my first day of professional work, I started as a data scientist at a FANG. My team of 9 had 3 Ph.Ds (all science Ph. Ds). As I understood it, the Ph.Ds do receive higher compensation but it's not that much more (~18% higher base) and if I really kick butt, I can out earn them with bonuses.
But I think my path was much easier and lucrative. I was able to save ~$100k, I had a standard of living above that of a regular graduate student and I had flexibility that they would dream of. I made 4 years worth of contacts of my profession, I
I'm sure some Ph.Ds are worth it as investments, but if you're interested in renumeration, get working.
Can't you offer them the job with starting date when they are scheduled to finish?
Why did it crush them? Shouldn't the job they agreed to take with you have set them up for success? Or did they not perform well and find themselves unemployed?
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Maybe they wanted to hire so they can patent it because some of the work was done during their employment?
Off topic