Comment by 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".
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.
What I was told is that if you research the patent and aware of its existence then you may be guilty of willful enfringement with treble the normal penalties:
https://www.jonesday.com/en/insights/2016/06/supreme-court-u...
https://www.ip-watch.org/2016/07/26/us-high-court-restores-t...
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you're right, its the creativity and alternative solutions.
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.