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Comment by dynamite-ready | Hacker News Reader

Prior to this, Google also successfully patented dropout layers, is that right? This being the case, what's the implication for hobbyists (like myself), businesses and researchers, etc? It's hard to imagine not being able to use such an abstract concept in your code, for fear of litigation.

For a layman like myself, it almost sounds like someone patenting the idea of a chair, or a table.

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If your interests are against Google in the future, and importantly they find it is necessary to go after you, they will sue you upon using those layers.

For most people it probably doesnt matter. Other big techs need to take notice

It feels like there should be a change in international IP laws to address patents as wide as this. I mean, in this case, even without expert analysis, I feel these network layer patterns can quite easily be likened to the widely used Gang of Four design patterns, or perhaps other concepts that have a highly technical basis. Like lenses, for example.

More precisely, network layer pattern descriptions surely lie in the class of a fact or discovery - https://www.prv.se/en/patents/applying-for-a-patent/before-t... - which should make the claim close to unenforceable at any level.

Unless the patent we're discussing covers a very specific implementation, which is uniquely efficient.

>> Other big techs need to take notice

Megacorps have nothing to worry about. They have enormous patent war chests and routinely violate each other's patents without even thinking twice. Engineers at such companies (including Google) are discouraged from even looking at patents, ever, not to mention deliberately researching anything patent related.

Correct. At my Fortune 100 tech companies engineers are told to not look up patents, and asked to generate two patents a year at my level just to keep the war chest full.

If you start to become a revenue issue for google, they will come after you. Till then should be fine.

How would anyone be able to tell if you train with dropout layers?

Or with batchnorm for that matter. The multiplicative part of BN can be folded into weights after training, and the additive portion can be folded into bias. Nobody would know you used BN in the first place. Dropout disappears altogether at inference time.

Most of the time litigation is just to harass and tire the weaker opponent, truth may not even matter.

Except, Google has never used patents offensively. Or at least I can‘t recall them doing it. They mostly just patent stuff for defense against patent trolls and companies like Oracle.

https://www.google.com/patents/licensing/

That probably greatly depends on some of the programs listed on the page above (check out the one at the very bottom, that suggests to my non lawyer mind that Google won't do so unless you sue them about patents first). Again, not a lawyer.

Disclosure: work at Google, do not speak for Google. Just helping with pointing out public info.

Hopefully they would include it in their Open Patent Non-Assertion Pledge:

https://www.google.com/patents/opnpledge/

Well that is also Googles fear. That some patent troll will come along and patent the tech.

You don't need to patent something to prevent others from patenting it, prior art prevents patenting by itself.

The existence of Google's patents on things like these are proof otherwise.

Yes, it is sometimes possible to prevent a patent from being filed with prior art, but you need to know about the application to provide the prior art, or you need to hope the patent examiner does due diligence, which they often don't.

So you have two options:

1. monitor all patent applications and reactively file prior art against any that might be problematic.

2. Just file patents on the things

Patent examiners are more likely to find patents than other forms of prior art, so you're more likely to just accomplish (1) anyway, and in a lawsuit, you don't need to spend time proving that your thing was prior art if it was patented. So in a lawsuit it was cheaper.

In other words, patents prevent patenting, prior art avoids losing lawsuits, but not-losing a lawsuit is still expensive.

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