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Comment by ggl_thorwaway | Hacker News Reader

When I was at Google, we were encouraged by our lawyers not to worry about patents or unique parts of any product. If there ever will be a claim, they will drown the company in legal fees, so nobody is going to dare to sue us.

Patents were used, in many cases, as a form of research into a new area.

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Not my google experience. They do say not worrying about patents, but that's because searching for patents could indeed make you liable as you were influenced by prior art.

Nobody at google even remotely mentioned "we will drown them in legal fees".

If anything, I have a huge respect for google legal.

Disclaimer: former googler.

Lots of anon accounts (reasonably) in this thread, so I want to back up as a non-anon former Googler that your experience matches mine. It wasn't "ignore patents", it was "don't look up patents so you aren't influenced by them".

I worked at Medtronic and currently work at Qualcomm. Both companies had policies matching this. Don't search patents so you are not influenced by them.

Since when did that matter in patent law? Patents are public domain, and ignorance of a patent is not a defense against having infringed. Since at least 2012, the US has had a first-to-file policy instead of first-to-invent.

There's no legal reason to worry about being influenced by a patent. The only concern might be boxing your creativity where you can't think of alternative solutions to a problem once you've seen one solution. That doesn't seem like a strong enough reason for a blanket policy.

IANAL but this confuses me.

What I was told is that if you research the patent and aware of its existence then you may be guilty of willful enfringement with treble the normal penalties:

https://www.jonesday.com/en/insights/2016/06/supreme-court-u...

https://www.ip-watch.org/2016/07/26/us-high-court-restores-t...

More precisely, a standing policy that researching patents is forbidden is prima facie evidence that your employees couldn't have possibly known about an existing patent. That means that a plaintiff suing for willful infringement will need to find evidence that someone went out of their way to ignore the policy. That might be quite difficult.

(Of course: not a lawyer, this is not legal advice)

Wow, I'm amazed that this would hold up. That's like saying that if I drive with a blindfold on, I couldn't possibly have willfully caused an accident because, as a matter of policy, I couldn't have been aware of the other cars on the road.

A more accurate analogy is a company policy that strictly prohibits driving.

you're right, its the creativity and alternative solutions.

Xoogler and current AWS and both companies have a "do not open or read patents" policy.

Another anon Googler here (with a slightly older account).

Your experience matches mine. I think it might even be somewhere in the mandatory periodic training.

Doing a patent search as a software engineer can only hurt you. Better just to route any questions to product counsel.

> They do say not worrying about patents, but that's because searching for patents could indeed make you liable as you were influenced by prior art.

I've heard the same thing in startups and other companies. This is not something unique to Google.

My previous company was acquired by Google and I totally agree with assessment. Immense respect for Google's investing, corp dev and legal arms in as much as I interacted with them. They always treated us fairly and were ethical in their interactions.

That is actually patents working as intended.

Unfortunately the way patent law works now, make patents usually not work unless someone is ignoring the law.

Patents were created to give a reason for people to publish their "secret sauce" in a public manner, so anyone could read and copy them or create new products based on the patent.

If you DON'T want your product copied, the correct course of action instead is make it secret, for example this is what Coca-Cola does (they rarely, if ever, patent their products, and they hide the best they can their recipes and processes)

Those are then described as trade secrets and have their own protections as well.

Trade secret protections can be quite strong as well. In 2006, 3 people were arrested by the FBI for trying to sell Coke formulas to Pepsi.

Contemporary article: https://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/06/business/06coke.html

More dramatized version with info from court proceedings: https://thehustle.co/coca-cola-stolen-recipe

Indeed

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/06/inventor-says-go...

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