Comment by zawerf
6 years ago
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.
Trademark regulations are fine. It's just patents and copyrights.
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.