And if you don't think such a thing would be useful to a company like this (if it could really be made to work) you aren't using your imagination properly.
Why does that not make sense? This has been the case at every job I've worked withe patent filing incentives. You get a few thousand dollars for coming up with an idea and going through the motions of writing the technical parts of the patent. The patent doesn't have to have anything to do with the business, they just want it for defense, and to increase value of a potential sale of the company.
It seems preposterous to me, but this is also the basic idea I've got from working at multiple big companies where they have training meetings to explain these things. You're very much encouraged to come up with ideas and submit them for the lawyers to look at and possibly patent even if it has no applicability to anything you're doing.
Sorry for contradicting you earlier. That still seems like a crazy way to manage IP, but after all I haven't got a better solution. Thanks for explaining. In my career I haven't been expected to produce patents very often. I'll try to remain a bit more humble.
Company A owns patents X, Y, Z. Company B owns patents M, N, O.
Company B sues company A that one of their products infringes on patent N. Company A countersues that 3 products of company B's infringes on X, Y, & Z.
That's the defensive aspect for company A. They won't instigate but they'll retaliate aggressively. This is known as the "nuclear option" as this strategy was employed during the Cold War - build up your offensive arsenal as a defensive measure to protect yourself against a first strike.
Plenty of examples during the smartphone patent wars[1] and perhaps this strategy isn't quite as successful as it once was.
For patent trolls having a large patent portfolio can increase the likelihood that you own a patent that the troll's patent is based on helping you with prior art claims. So having a large patent portfolio improves your defensiveness there. Additionally a large patent portfolio increases the value of your company because those patents are IP that have tangible value in the market; many tech companies choose not to monetize but frequently IP licenses can be bought/sold (or even the patents transferred) and mutual IP licensing is frequently part of lawsuit settlements so there's further value there. Since it's impossible to actually predict the value of almost any given patent in the future, having a large war chest improves your bargaining position/value of the patent portfolio.
Part of the reason is that companies would rather err on the side of obtaining a patent on something patentable rather than miss it & get sued by someone else. Another reason is that it can easily turn out that there are significant technical challenges in productizing an idea but you don't find out until well after you've filed the patent.
There's also a defensive aspect. For patent trolls you want to beat them to filing the patent so you have a far easier legal defence - America was first to file until very recently so that was also a significant incentive in filing defensive patents. For competitors you want to have the patent so that if it turns out a successful product by another company relies on your product heavily you can use it offensively or defensively in case that competitor comes after you (traditionally the bigger Silicon Valley companies have preferred to stick to defensive use of patents against competitors but that isn't always the case).
Finally there's a financial incentive to this from the employee side. Patents bring you bonuses and prestige. That means you have an incentive to push even questionable patents through the process. The patent filing process is completely divorced from marketing AFAIK (haven't sat on any review boards) so no one ever considers the negative PR risk from articles like this (probably rightly so).
> And if you don't think such a thing would be useful to a company like this (if it could really be made to work) you aren't using your imagination properly.
Of course it would be useful. However realistically the engineer in me thinks that when deployed at scale suddenly it can become a lot less useful than other more straightforward methods; both in terms of compute & memory required as well as accuracy. There are cheaper more accurate ways to solve this so why bother wth something so complex/expensive that carries significant PR risk? In fact, FB owning & not using this patent means they can win PR brownie points suing companies that do attempt to use this technique.
Think more along the lines of competitor companies that are already operating.