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Comment by stochastic_monk | Hacker News Reader

This is incredibly stupid. Recurrent Neural Networks? Reinforcement Learning Systems? Generating audio with neural networks?

These can’t be valid.

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They're almost certainly not as broad as the title would suggest. You've got to look at the claims to figure out what the patent apps seek to cover. The title does not define the scope of activity they seek to cover. Usually, it just specifies the field in which they purport to have invented something.

Every patent application needs to have a title, but the title just needs to be short, accurate and descriptive. MPEP 606.[0]

Validity (subject matter eligibility, novelty, non-obviousness, etc.) is a separate question.

I think I would even go so far as to say that a faulty title could never invalidate a patent claim.

[0] https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s606.html

Did you actually read the patent? Or did you just read the title? The title of the patent is not the patent itself. The details of what they are patenting is described in (sometime very longs and numerous) pages of technical description. I'm an engineer at a big tech company and I'm an author on many patents that have pretty generic/vague names. The actual invention is described in depth in the patent application and that's what's important

Look at the claims... devil is in the details.

2018071392 has the claims on page 23 of 33. They specify:

A DNN trained on simulated input

Controlling a "robot" based on actual input

That's pretty obviously a "devil".

Assuming a patent issues with the claims as presented, all of the elements need to be present for there to be infringement. Claim 1 of the application you cited takes up almost an entire page of text and comprises more than a dozen limiting elements, of which you've paraphrased two. If there's a devil here, it's a lot smaller than you're implying it is.

They can't be, unless Google decides to enforce them. It's not the first time they crowd-source massive amounts of specialized effort, only to steal all the data, close them off and get away with it.

Panoramio is the biggest one I know. They essentially stole 10 years worth of effort from a community collecting carefully positioning millions of geo-tagged photos.

Then you have Youtube. It's not completely closed off, but you can't query the video database, you can't discover any of the old content, and they "delete" (hide from the public) all issues they consider controversial or against their political beliefs.

Now it's possible they used the good old 3Es to stimulate academic research relevant to their targets, use it to create useful products, and then patent everything to choke out the competition. Of course they have better ways to kill competitors (imagine the massive potential for undercutting they have, and how nobody cares about undercutting in the online world).

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