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Comment by ggl_thorwaway

6 years ago

When I was at Google, we were encouraged by our lawyers not to worry about patents or unique parts of any product. If there ever will be a claim, they will drown the company in legal fees, so nobody is going to dare to sue us.

Patents were used, in many cases, as a form of research into a new area.

20 comments

ggl_thorwaway

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former-googler  6 years ago

Not my google experience. They do say not worrying about patents, but that's because searching for patents could indeed make you liable as you were influenced by prior art.

Nobody at google even remotely mentioned "we will drown them in legal fees".

If anything, I have a huge respect for google legal.

Disclaimer: former googler.

  • paulgb  6 years ago

    Lots of anon accounts (reasonably) in this thread, so I want to back up as a non-anon former Googler that your experience matches mine. It wasn't "ignore patents", it was "don't look up patents so you aren't influenced by them".

    • abfan1127  6 years ago

      I worked at Medtronic and currently work at Qualcomm. Both companies had policies matching this. Don't search patents so you are not influenced by them.

      7 replies →

    • altgoogler  6 years ago

      Another anon Googler here (with a slightly older account).

      Your experience matches mine. I think it might even be somewhere in the mandatory periodic training.

      Doing a patent search as a software engineer can only hurt you. Better just to route any questions to product counsel.

  • lurkervizzle  6 years ago

    My previous company was acquired by Google and I totally agree with assessment. Immense respect for Google's investing, corp dev and legal arms in as much as I interacted with them. They always treated us fairly and were ethical in their interactions.

  • riyadparvez  6 years ago

    > They do say not worrying about patents, but that's because searching for patents could indeed make you liable as you were influenced by prior art.

    I've heard the same thing in startups and other companies. This is not something unique to Google.

speeder  6 years ago

That is actually patents working as intended.

Unfortunately the way patent law works now, make patents usually not work unless someone is ignoring the law.

Patents were created to give a reason for people to publish their "secret sauce" in a public manner, so anyone could read and copy them or create new products based on the patent.

If you DON'T want your product copied, the correct course of action instead is make it secret, for example this is what Coca-Cola does (they rarely, if ever, patent their products, and they hide the best they can their recipes and processes)