Vigilante engineer stops Waymo from patenting key lidar technology

This is so typical in technology now, large corporations patenting everything they can possibly think of, including things that they've blatantly copied. It absolutely doesn't surprise me that a technology as fundamentally simple and foundational as LIDAR is covered by a load of bullshit patents. As the article notes what this is really about is using your patents to litigate competitors either to slow their progress or force them into expensive fights that drain their resources. Frankly, patent reform is yet another case where the large players have built themselves a moat.

What if patent applications required a fee that was added to a bounty fund to reward people that could demonstrate prior art during the examination period? Engineers like Swildens would then be more than interested bystanders, but have skin in the game and therefore incentive to do what he did just out of interest.

Bounty claims could also require an accompanying fee, to be refunded if the claim succeeds. The fees would discourage low quality patent applications and bounty claims.

> He then spent $6,000 of his own money to launch a formal challenge to 936.

Either he has a lot of spare time and money or this isn't the full story.

This is really pissing me off as they can essentially patent anything and everything and squash all completion. It’s now an arms race of patents among the tech giants.

I remember reading here how Google was patenting neural network layers such as dropout etc.

“Waymo's lidar firing circuit showed current passing along a wire between the circuit and the ground in two directions—something generally deemed impossible. ”

It’s almost as if science said, “Give me one free miracle, and from there the entire thing will proceed with a seamless, causal explanation.”’17 The one free miracle was the sudden appearance of all the matter and energy in the universe, with all the laws that govern it. Rupert Sheldrake, The Science Delusion: Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry

> describes how a laser diode can be configured to emit pulses of laser light using a circuit that includes an inductor and a gallium nitride transistor.

Did they seriously try to patent an oscillator? Galium nitride FET or a vacuum tube, this design is at least 100 years old. WTF.

The very least the courts could do here is make the patent owner pay back the 6000$ the engineer spent on the challenge. Of course, IMO they should get a big fine to go with that too.