Comment by greysonp

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.