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Comment by doctorpangloss | Hacker News Reader

Google’s patent strategy is to patent everything it sees and hears about. This is a good case of it: https://patentpandas.org/stories/company-patented-my-idea . As long as patent attorneys are on quotas at Google, they will be filing bullshit patents they didn’t invent all the same as the trolls.

Anything sincere about US patents must always be about how they should cost basically nothing to file correctly by inventors themselves. Otherwise it’s just rich people suing other rich people.

Especially software patents. If you are pro startup you are anti software patent. The status quo is a deadweight transfer from investors to patent attorneys.

The more you think and read about this, the more it will piss you off.

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> Google’s patent strategy is to patent everything it sees and hears about. This is a good case of it: https://patentpandas.org/stories/company-patented-my-idea . As long as patent attorneys are on quotas at Google, they will be filing bullshit patents they didn’t invent all the same as the trolls.

No, that's not the strategy. I served for a while on a engineers' committee in Geo to evaluate submitted patent ideas, 1-4, "1" being "definitely patent, we're doing this" and "4" being "this is so bad you don't even get the $50 for the idea." Usually it got a "2" if it was something we might do sometime, and a "3" if it was a good idea but not worth patenting.

I submitted five or so applications (in Ads, not in Geo). Several they dropped when the post-CLS Bank PTO rejected them on 101 (subject matter) grounds. Since it can cost $50,000 or more to prosecute a patent, and that is cash to an outside law firm, not just Google lawyers' salaries.

As for this patentpandas guy: there is lots of prior art. This guy is a naif. "Publish any idea you have as soon as you have it" is always a good rule.

> As for this patentpandas guy: there is lots of prior art... This guy is a naif.

You're a lawyer, whose job is reading shit, and you thought the protagonist was a man?

This is just stylistically razzing you. I am not this cynical and you are a qualified expert. The takeaway is that the status quo for patenting in software, and staff attorneys generally, is really unpopular, among highly educated people. There has to be major change.

> You're a lawyer

No, actually. A patent agent.

> the status quo for patenting in software, and staff attorneys generally, is really unpopular, among highly educated people.

"highly educated" doesn't mean what you'd like it to. But yes, there should be major changes, starting with making software ineligible for the one-size-fits-all patent system.

Are you talking about the time period of the article, so looks like 2014ish?

I think Google changed its patent strategy fairly abruptly at some point. Currently they aren’t too excited about filing patents, but at some point in the past they definitely were.

It was never "patent everything you can see."

That committee I was talking about was to evaluate IDEAS for patents, so they were definitely beating the bushes. But not shooting everything that came out.

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