Former Google corporate attorney becomes Deputy Director of US Patent Office | Hacker News Reader

Former Google corporate attorney becomes Deputy Director of US Patent Office

wired.com

91 pointsjonah25 comments

I fall into the camp that believes that patents shouldn't exist at all, but if we could at least stop granting vague and abusable patents for software and business processes, I'll take it.

I know nothing about Michelle Lee, but if she spent time at Google, there's no way she doesn't have some understanding of how bad the patent ecosystem has become. The only question is whether the bad publicity around patent trolls has created enough political will to push back against bad patents, given that granting as many patents as possible is effectively the business model of the USPTO.

"...given that granting as many patents as possible is effectively the business model of the USPTO."

and the one that companies exploit a lot knowing they have backlog of cases. Each case should be examined carefully by the office. See how crowd validation can come in handy: http://patents.stackexchange.com/

I do not know the success rate but they have helped invalidate some patents in initial stage itself. A similar official and easy to participate program will be even more helpful.

PS: I would recommend watching the movie "Flash of a genius". It is regarding invention of time delayed windshield wipers, and how bigger car companies stole idea from a guy after he pitched them.

To me, bringing a Google employee on board signals that bad software patents are important to the USPTO (as they are to Google).

I don't think we're going to see any changes as a result of this: it's more likely that bad patent granting will become entrenched.

How about "Former Google corporate attorney becomes Deputy Director of US Patent Office"?

EDIT: (commenting on the article title; not the HN title)

I had a coworker once who said he'd found a good anti-Hearst-pattern for Google executives: "Google exec". (A Hearst pattern, for those who aren't well-versed in information retrieval, is like a linguistic template for IS-A relationships. For example, if you see the text "<person>, a <thing>, ..." or "<person> is a <thing>" or "<thing> <person> recently <verb>", you can be reasonably sure that <person> is a <thing>.) In other words, if the press reports someone is a Google exec, they are almost certainly not a Google exec.

I've done a few spot checks and this seems to hold up. Andy Rubin, Google's Android executive until recently, is called an "engineer", "founder", and in one case "head honcho" in the press. Larry and Sergey are usually called "founders". Amit Singhal, Google's Search executive, is referred to as "engineer", "chief", and sometimes "senior vice president". Sundar Pichai is referred to as "senior vice president" and "head of android and chrome". Vic Gundotra and Susan Wojcicki each got one mention as "Google exec", but are much more commonly titled "senior vice president" or "head of social/ads & commerce".

By contrast, the people who are usually labeled "executives" in the press are often corporate attorneys, regional marketing managers, or mid-level ops managers.

I have noticed the same. The time it really stood out to me was that guy who started the Facebook page for the Egyptian protests a few years back. The press was reporting him as a "Google executive", but he was actually an Adwords account executive. I don't know if there is a position further from exec than someone who manages Adwords accounts for big customers.

"Executive" is commonly used for any reasonably senior management position. This is arguably correct.

Executive: relating to the job of managing or directing other people in a company or organizaton[1]

Interestingly, for me Googling define:Executive gives the following definition and example: a person with senior managerial responsibility in a business. "account executives"

(Note that "account executives" are the specific example given).

[1] http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/executive

Right, but my point is that an adwords account exec/manager does not have any managerial responsibility at all. They would be more properly termed account technicians or analysts.

Hopefully she sets up a system so only a tiny fraction of those 600,000 backlogged patents get accepted by USPTO employees, while the others get discarded as the useless patents that they are. Then USPTO will have time to pass the patents that really matter, right on schedule, too.

This is a very interesting appointment, and brings about an interesting question on government appointments. Without knowing anything about Michelle Lee, my first thought was, "Great, this is someone who actually knows something about the topic, rather than some political hack!" But then I switched to, "Didn't I think the same way when banking execs went to jobs in the Treasury?"

At what point is this industry capturing the regulators that should be watching them? This was a big enough problem in Japan that they forbid execs from regulating the industries that they used to work in.

My sense is in this case it's still probably a net positive. Looking only at her LinkedIn profile, it seems like she was a technologist first, then a lawyer, then a Google GC. Seems like the right intellectual background. We will see if she has the political savvy to negotiate a large bureaucracy. For all of our sake I hope she's able to pull it off!

Abolish intellectual property.

Sounds good. I'll just make a closed source version of the Linux kernel now.

(Copyleft is based around intellectual property.)

I can't see it ever happening, but a government forcing everyone to distribute the sources and rights to redistribute/modify along with their works pretty clearly abolishes intellectual property.

As a lesser thought: currently, when you publish a book in the US, you are legally required to send a copy to the Library of Congress. I could see the same thing working for software, requiring a submission of source code to some central publicly-accessible digital library. No licencing requirements beyond "people can read this," but that'd still be an unearthly boon to, say, security researchers.

Good luck in your endeavor!

That's a complete non-sequitur.

If there are no intellectual property laws, nothing will change, except peoples ability to sue each other.

How does the ability to sue help open source?

Could we really tell the difference between that and the current model of having locked down devices that you can't upgrade running closed source kernel modules?

Throw the baby out with the bathwater.

What fucking baby?

Everything intellectual property does is bad. It's a monopoly on an idea. It's insane.

Argument by swearing is kind of weak. There is plenty of evidence we've gone too far towards producers in terms of intellectual property, but eliminating everything: copyright, trademarks and all patents seems like it might require a bit more than a few F bombs to back up your point.

Ditto.

Hopefully this is a sign of good things to come for Tech.

Wow, the State Dept and now the USPTO. What parts of government will they touch next? FCC, DOT, FDA, or Consumer Protection?

This person formerly worked at Google, not currently.

And I am SURE that will not influence any judgement regarding any patent matters related to Google!

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