Comment by neil_s
6 years ago
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.