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Comment by paul7986 | Hacker News Reader

A mutual NDA was signed as seen here https://ryanspahn.com/motorola-google-Expired-NDA2013.pdf.

We started SpeakerBlast in March 2013 & were meeting with Google in April 2013. We filed a provisional before the meeting & have a patent in the patent office.

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NDAs generally aren't worth the paper they're written on, but holy hell is that one a piece of work. The "residuals" concept basically gives them an open invite to copy anything they like so long as they didn't "intentionally memorize" it. Establishing intent is no easy task.

The one thing that NDAs do extremely well, and the reason that companies like them signed is protect against prior art (the opposite of what we're talking about above). Without an NDA, if you've had a conversation with another company about your tech, then it has become public domain and you can be prevented from patenting. With NDA that problem doesn't exist.

Conversation with a company doesn't count as prior art under new first-to-publish rules.

Yes, establishing intent to memorize is near impossible. You would have to have something like written records (e.g. emails) stating the intent.

The tech came a long way after meeting them... its now a web app driven by JS that plays, pauses, forwards, rewinds audio in sync as seen in this 2014 video...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJ9itwp_wYc&index=20&list=UU...

We revived it after seeing Google's April 2018 patent & are excited about finally getting it out to the public.

An NDA is only as good as the lawyers backing them up.

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