Comment by patentpandas

6 years ago

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