Comment by 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.
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".
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.
Since when did that matter in patent law? Patents are public domain, and ignorance of a patent is not a defense against having infringed. Since at least 2012, the US has had a first-to-file policy instead of first-to-invent.
There's no legal reason to worry about being influenced by a patent. The only concern might be boxing your creativity where you can't think of alternative solutions to a problem once you've seen one solution. That doesn't seem like a strong enough reason for a blanket policy.
IANAL but this confuses me.
6 replies →
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.
Xoogler and current AWS and both companies have a "do not open or read patents" policy.
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.
> 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.