Comment by ataturk

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.