Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview - <AUTHOR> https://patentpandas.org/stories/company-patented-my-idea <comment><USER2> I met/had a similar experience with Google ATAP in 2013 (was Motorala ATAP then; Google recently bought them) though not for a job interview but to discuss working together to build our tech SpeakerBlast into the Moto X.

They asked if we ever thought about selling our technology to them before the meeting and at the meeting they baited us for how our tech worked saying we'd like to work with you tell us how it works. Once we did they left the room (Dugan's 2nd right hand man at the time and another) & 3 minutes later showed us the door saying the "race is on."

They have since been awarded patents for audio syncing across phones.

Many here will say that's just how Silicon Valley works.... takes advantage and stomps on the little guy innovators & their dreams. That's not professional and I met with many other companies like Samsung who acted with the utmost respect & professionalism towards us. Yet, Google whose motto is "Don't Be Evil," can't act in the same fashion?

<comment><USER3> This is a level of douchiness I cannot fathom. What possesses these people to act in this fashion and how do they sleep at night? How is this not seen as clearly unethical behavior? A clear violation of Wheaton's Law, here.

I mean... I could easily take that lollipop from that naïve baby in that baby carriage... but I don't, simply because I'm Not A Dick™.

Did all of Silicon Valley get the wrong takeaway from the Apple/Xerox thing, or something?

<comment><USER4> Why do elite decision makers, CEO's, boards of directors, make decisions that will certainly have adverse effects, that will literally _kill_ people (eg. Trafigura), just to make more profit? Despite the fact that they are all already individually multi-millionaires and could not really materially improve their lives with more money?

I've ruminated on this.

I think the only reason that could explain such excess is competitiveness. To them, it is like a game. Its not about getting another yacht, its about beating the _other_ guy. I think its the same mechanism that will drive someone to grind for many hours in an MMO or suchlike.

<comment><USER5> I've tended to think that a lot of it is about different social circles. If everyone you know makes $50-100k/yr, you feel fine making that yourself, and may not even be sure what you'd do with a million dollars. If your social circle is full of millionaires and multi-millionaries, all of the sudden making a million feels like barely getting by and you think about all of the cool stuff you see people around you getting that you could get if you had tens of millions.

<comment><USER6> I think it's different past ~$150k salary too (probably more like $200k-$300k in the valley). At that point there's this weird net worth dick measuring contest that becomes a lot of people at that level's xbox gamer score. As in it's this number that they've attached a whole lot of identity to to be able to compare to their peers. It has very little to about what they can actually do with that number and more that they just want a bigger one than their friends.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> She worded that way too diplomatically.

What google did here is one of the evilest things you can do.

They are taking open research and trying to close it off. Research that they didn't even contribute to! Research that they didn't need patent rights for because it's already free for them to use. But they can't allow anyone after them to have the same privilege can they?

<comment><USER8> These are just some of the reasons patents are fundamentally broken and the patent system as a whole should be scrapped. Another big issue is that, like most any law, enforcing it costs significant money, and that cost scales depending upon who your opponent is. The cost for a little guy to enforce a patent claim against google is vastly out of proportion to the cost of google to enforce a patent claim against a little guy. This means that the patent system ends up being another form of regulatory capture used to squash competition. If we just removed patents, major corporations would be just as free as today to steal from the little guys, but at least they couldn't then weaponize their patents to crush the original inventors.

<comment><USER9> Not just patents, but all intellectual property. Copyright is arguably even more broken, lasting a century or more. It's ridiculous. My disdain for the DMCA is immeasurable, and the upcoming EU directive looks even worse.

Not only are these systems broken in their implementation, but there is little evidence that even in their most pure form they accomplished their supposed intention.

<comment><USER10> Trademark regulations are fine. It's just patents and copyrights.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> IANAL, but 35 U.S. Code § 115 requires that _" each individual who is the inventor or a joint inventor of a claimed invention in an application for patent shall execute an oath or declaration"_ that they believe _" himself or herself to be the original inventor or an original joint inventor of a claimed invention in the application,"_ and acknowledging _" that any willful false statement made in such declaration or statement is punishable under section 1001 of title 18 by fine or imprisonment of not more than 5 years, or both."_

So... How is this not _literally_ a crime?

<comment><USER12> This. Google should also probably take disciplinary actions.

<comment><USER13> You are kidding right? They even encourage it by making you sign a visitor agreement so that you have no right to the IP you discuss.

<comment><USER14> Invention is not the same as assignment. You can sign away assignment, but inventorship remains with the inventor(s).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Let us not forget when Google tried to patent an algorithm for Assymetric Numeral Systems developed by an academic scientist with intent of making it available in a public domain. Seems like this kind of practice is more common with Google than one might think.

Here are some articles about that: [https://www.inquisitr.com/4935898/google- accused-of-trying-t...](https://www.inquisitr.com/4935898/google-accused-of- trying-to-patent-work-inventor-created-for-public-to-use-for-free/) [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/08/after-patent-office- re...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/08/after-patent-office-rejection-it- time-google-abandon-its-attempt-patent-use-public)

And a HN link: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14751977](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14751977)

</comment><comment><USER16> Did you sign Google's visitor agreement? Did you _read_ Google's visitor agreement. You give up some IP rights by signing that. This is a case where it matters. When I visited Google, I refused to sign. They just give you a badge that said you didn't sign.

<comment><USER17> Unless you've been visiting other offices from the one I've been visiting, the agreement pretty much says:

* No taking photographs or video without permission.

* Don't disclose things you see in the office outside the office

It's literally 3 sentences, and they have handy little icons next to each.

I see nothing about IP rights assignment or anything of the sort.

<comment><USER18> But different companies use different forms of visitor NDA — and lawyers purely _love_ to load up contract forms with "protective" language to show how knowledgeable they are. This can be dangerous to counterparties; Stanford, in effect, lost part-ownership of a patent for HIV diagnostic testing because a Stanford investigator signed a visitor NDA that included IP-assignment language [0]. The case went all the way to the (U.S.) Supreme Court (about a tangential statutory issue).

The lesson: _Always_ RTFA before signing it (where the A stands for the agreement), because sadly there's no such thing as an accepted, named standard.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_University_v._Roche_M...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_University_v._Roche_Molecular_Systems,_Inc.#Dispute)

<comment><USER19> Your comment is incredibly misleading. This wasn't the "you came by our office for lunch" NDA. This was the "you worked here for a while, and we trained you and taught you our techniques, which you later used in an invention" NDA.

<comment><USER18> > _This wasn 't the "you came by our office for lunch" NDA. This was the "you > worked here for a while, and we trained you and taught you our techniques, > which you later used in an invention" NDA._

Citation for the first assertion? Here's an excerpt from the Supreme Court's summary of the facts: One Dr. Mark Holodniy [0], who had recently joined a Stanford lab as a fellow, _" signed a Visitor's Confidentiality Agreement (VCA). That agreement stated that Holodniy "will assign and do[es] hereby assign" to Cetus_ [predecessor to Roche] _his "right, title and interest in each of the ideas, inventions and improvements" made "as a consequence of [his] access" to Cetus."_ [1] The trial court's opinion [2] states that Holodniy signed the VCA "[a]t the time he began working at Cetus"; it wouldn't be the least bit surprising if he did so without first getting the VCA reviewed by the Stanford legal department, because after all it's just an NDA, right?

Yes, the Stanford fellow worked at Cetus for nine months learning various techniques — which were published — and, months later, used (at least some of) the techniques when working with his Stanford colleagues.

The point is that a relatively-junior Stanford employee — as a result of having signed another organization's "Visitor Confidentiality Agreement" — in effect gave the other organization a get-out-of-jail-free card: The other organization was allowed to infringe Stanford's patent on a _later_ invention by _other_ Stanford investigators because the junior employee's own contribution to that invention qualified as a "consequence" of the employee's previous training at the other organization.

> _Your comment is incredibly misleading._

You're entitled to your opinion, of course. The lesson is still valid: RTFA before you sign it — because otherwise you might be giving away valuable rights months or years down the road.

[0] [https://profiles.stanford.edu/mark- holodniy](https://profiles.stanford.edu/mark-holodniy)

[1] [https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=145195436028699...](https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=14519543602869990622).

[2] [https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=776650368736548...](https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=7766503687365482465)

<comment><USER19> _Citation for the first assertion?_

You're making it sound like he just popped in one day and had a sandwich and a chat with the people working there. Your own citation, though, is to "the time he began working at Cetus". The "visitor" NDA there is more like "visit" in the sense of "visiting professor" \-- someone who will be there for an extended time, working alongside the other people there.

And your original link to Wikipedia's summary says:

 _The Stanford lab in which Holodniy worked had been working on developing better HIV tests, and wanted to try the new PCR method, so Holodniy 's supervisor had arranged for him to work at Cetus to learn the technique ... [a]fter completing his training at Cetus, Holodniy then returned to Stanford where he and other Stanford employees tested the HIV measurement technique._

If you work somewhere for a while and they give you training in the stuff they do, they're going to want you to keep that confidential and probably want to make claims on anything you develop as a result of what they taught you. You are heavily misrepresenting the word "visitor" to make it sound like he was only there for an office tour or something.

<comment><USER18> We're talking past each other here:

\- You're arguing that it was meet and right for Cetus to claim ownership of anything that the Stanford fellow did, presumably _ad infinitum_ , as long as it was a "consequence" of the training that Cetus provided to the Stanford fellow. While I think that's a pretty aggressive position, I really don't care, because it's a business decision for each party to make.

\- In contrast, I _am_ suggesting that the Stanford fellow probably didn't realize the consequences of his signing a so-called confidentiality agreement, and that the lesson is to RTFA, not to assume that the agreement is limited by what its title says.

<comment><USER19> _You 're arguing that it was meet and right for Cetus to claim ownership_

No, I'm claiming that it should not have been surprising that the agreement for someone who worked there included such claims. How I personally feel about it is irrelevant; it's a standard practice, and to be expected.

What I am arguing with is your repeated use of terms like "visitor", to make it sound like the guy just popped in for lunch one day and they claimed all his work. He worked there. They trained and taught him. While there are contexts in which "visitor" can be the appropriate term for that (again, see "visiting professor"), the usual connotation of "visitor" is incredibly misleading here, and I wish you'd be more clear about it.

<comment><USER18> > _What I am arguing with is your repeated use of terms like "visitor", to > make it sound like the guy just popped in for lunch one day and they claimed > all his work. ... the usual connotation of "visitor" is incredibly > misleading here, and I wish you'd be more clear about it._

"Visitor's Confidentiality Agreement" was the title of the NDA, for Pete's sake; _that 's_ what makes it sound as though the guy popped in for a meeting.

And the trial court's opinion says that the Stanford fellow "commut[ed] daily" to Cetus. This seems to suggest strongly that the fellow divided his time between Stanford and Cetus — in effect, that the guy was a daily visitor to Cetus, as opposed to being seconded to Cetus.

Again, the point: _RTFA_ — because hindsight opinions might differ about what you should or shouldn't have expected.

<comment><USER19> So he _worked_ there, and commuted to _work_ there, because of how he _worked_ there.

And you brought this up in a thread about something not even close to the same situation, yet presented it as relevant. And doubled down despite being contradicted by your own sources. He worked there. He knew he worked there. He was not just popping in for half an hour that one time to have lunch with them. He worked there and they trained him on their techniques while he worked there. The fact that the word "visitor" was in there is not relevant and does not make it be the same situation that this thread was about. It is not the same situation. It is not a similar situation. It is not the same situation because -- have I mentioned this? -- he worked there.

<comment><USER18> I turn over my king, sir ....

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Its another example of why these types of patents shouldn't even be allowed. There are always a large number of people who don't get credit and/or won't get paid. And then all of the people who have very similar ideas or maybe the same one who get blocked from bringing products to market.

If the patent system somehow made it so people like the author of this post would actually make lots of money, that would be different. But it doesn't work that way.

There was an application that I worked on. I figured out all of the hard technical problems as the lead developer. Then when the guy got funding he kicked me off of the project, hired his friends, and filed a patent. He was "nice enough" to put my name on it but not as an assignee. Meaning I could never own any of the hard work I did.

This is the type of thing that reminds me that the idea that we really even have a civilization is a myth. Everything is just a game where the people who start with the biggest advantages and stoop low enough for the best scams come out on top.

<comment><USER21> Patent law includes a provision for situations like this - it's called "derivation," meaning basically that someone stole another person's work and tried to patent it. The rightful inventor can initiate a proceeding at the patent office to invalidate the patent and get control of the work.

<comment><USER22> If you add enough bling to an existing idea, you can patent that, if the bling you add is an obvious and probably necessary path forward, you can still steel ideas from the public domain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Regina Dugan is a former head of DARPA as well as ATAP. She has an impressive resume. Why would she do something like this? For a not particularly important patent, LED popup books? It seems bizarre.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regina_E._Dugan](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regina_E._Dugan)

<comment><USER20> People don't get to the top by being ethical. They get to the top of the org chart by playing politics. Many of them are practically psychopaths.

<comment><USER24> The good news is that very few people are at the top. Most are in the middle, and it's entirely possible to be ethical and in a good middling position.

<comment><USER25> How can you justify your work in the middle as ethical, if it directly supports a rotten apple at the top? Your life's work turned into a support system for a beast, wonderful!

<comment><USER26> Are you making reference to this? [https://goo.gl/images/2UmYrg](https://goo.gl/images/2UmYrg)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> It's down to individuals rather than culture in these things. By purely statistics, an organisation of any size has less than ethical people in it even if they have the best outward impression. Unfortunately these sorts of people tend to favour power and slowly work their way to positions that give them that. Then the whole org is a bad apple.

Having been in a similar situation before, the correct answer is "I'll get my lawyer to contact you with our NDA process" or if you're really worried "fuck off".

It's probably better to file patent first though. The patent is what you need to sell them.

<comment><USER28> Repeated unethical behavior is not the fault of a few bad actors, but of an organization designed to encourage that behavior. I wouldn't discount Google as being at fault seeing as how we already have two instances of Google's ATAP committing patent fraud despite little research and outreach being done.

One fun fact I stumbled across is any misconduct when filing for a patent voids the entire patent application, not just the claims that the misconduct occurred in: [https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s2016.html](https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s2016.html)

<comment><USER27> Assholes hire assholes. Eventually the assholes all float to the top and make asshole decisions. You can't win. This is a failure mode of every organisation I have ever seen.

<comment><USER29> My take on it is as long as there are instruments to abuse there will be unethical people to do so. Patent law and drug prohibition are equivalent, to me, in this way. They create unnatural economic sectors where unethical behavior is favored.

<comment><USER22> They give a legal framework for unethical people to prosper. They are "hacking" the system. Highly moral societies are especially ripe for this kind of victimization because many of the "laws" are social norms that everyone just follows.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'm amazed at how relaxed their response is. If I told someone about some of my work and then found out they'd tried to patent it, I would be _pissed_!

<comment><USER31> If you want your secrets to remain secret, you shouldn't divulge your secrets.

<comment><USER32> If you want to protect your secrets, you should patent them so when someone figures out your secret, or in this case your creative idea, you have a leg to stand on. Otherwise, they figure out your secret or idea and you have nothing. This is the entire purpose of patents and, despite many of the current issues with patents, they are still effective in many cases.

While you can argue patents are only paper, a valuable patent is worth defending. In this case, she was able to demonstrate prior art, meaning that a patent could not be granted since they have no idea to protect since it's been in the public domain (i.e. released to the world) and not an original/non- trivial idea. This is why academic publication, or in the past the use of laboratory journals, are useful in documenting time of the invention.

<comment><USER31> The patent system is just a mechanism that uses the threat of state violence to prop up the idea that an idea is property that can be owned. This concept is false, and the sooner people abandon that model the better off we will all be. The state can't use the threat of violence to make pi equal to 3, to make a public domain codec a "google invention", nor to deed title to the number two. Remember, parents are just an industrial incentive mechanism propped up by cops, nothing more.

<comment><USER33> You could say the same thing about any form of property.

<comment><USER34> No, only about Imaginary Property.

<comment><USER33> No, it is literally true that the threat of state violence is what props up the ability to own any property.

<comment><USER34> This is so obviously wrong I have no idea how to continue.

<comment><USER33> What stops other people from taking your tangible property other than the threat of state action?

Sure, there are plenty of people who would refrain from stealing anyway just because it's morally wrong. But there are enough people who don't care that the whole idea of property rights becomes meaningless in practice without some way of enforcing them.

<comment><USER35> > What stops other people from taking your tangible property other than the > threat of state action?

Aside from morals, the threat of _reciprocation_ , not by the state specifically but by the property owner who was harmed and anyone authorized to act on their behalf.

Unlike actual property, IP isn't based on reciprocation. The penalties for infringement go _way_ beyond simply losing similar forms of IP.

<comment><USER33> The penalty for stealing my TV might well include a bullet in the chest. I'm not sure what your point is.

<comment><USER35> That would simply be murder, not a just or reasonable response to someone stealing your TV. In any case it still doesn't involve any state action, so we appear to be in violent agreement that, contrary to your original assertion, the state is not the only thing stopping other people from taking your property.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> The story in the article about Jill MacKay stealing their LED sticker idea then trying to sell them the patent for $5m is infuriating. Goes to show you can get scammed by some jeweler in Colorado just as fast and easily as by huge Corp like Google.

I suppose it's possible she had the idea, saw their kickstarter then submitted a patent to CYA. But then why back the kickstarter? Just feels fishy.

<comment><USER37> Probably the same reason some major companies (FTSE250/Fortune 500) do the same thing. It's called a "competitor product teardown" \- the goal is to identify things your competitors are doing, whether they're patented, and whether you can do the same thing (or something similar) to improve your own product.

It's basically the BigCo Inc. version of "that's a great idea, I'm glad I thought of it". (and usually patented it too)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Similar story and time as Google ANS patent: [https://arstechnica.com/features/2018/06/inventor-says- googl...](https://arstechnica.com/features/2018/06/inventor-says-google-is- patenting-work-he-put-in-the-public-domain/)

<comment><USER39> Duda might have won this one [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/08/after- patent-office-re...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/08/after-patent- office-rejection-it-time-google-abandon-its-attempt-patent-use-public)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I'm surprised this isn't mentioned, but there are a couple of possibilities here: a) the Google folks listed did actually steal the patent, as described b) the Google folks were working on this already, saw someone in academia that was doing very relevant work, and called them in to see if they'd like to join the team. Not clear how interview went. Unrelated to the interview, the team filed a patent when significant progress was being made.

Correlation != causation, so unless there's evidence that the author had a super specific take on electronics in popup books where the probability of someone independently working on the exact same thing is very low, how can we jump to the conclusion that it must be explanation A?

Disclaimer: I work at at El Goog, but these views are obviously my own. It's entirely possible that explanation A is the truth in this case, but it seems like people are taking it as a foregone conclusion

<comment><USER41> Presumably because Google didn't communicate anything along the lines of "we were already working on this". Even then, there's so much prior art in open research that the patent was invalidated anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Now interviewing at Google is not only an exercise in futility and alienation, you can also have your ideas stolen as part of it.

Good to know

</comment><comment><USER43> Not in any supporting this, but likely what happened was:

a. some googlers met Leah for casual/interview talk

b. Leah describes her ideas in detail

c. Said Googlers steal her idea and patent it thinking 2 years is long time

d. Leah comes to know and Google is caught with hand in cookie jar

This is very Google should have practiced the do no evil. Instead they tried to salvage the situation.

</comment><comment><USER44> Software patents need to be banned.

In the interim, employee incentives (ego, bonuses) to being listed as an "inventor" while BigCompany remains the "assignee" could be ameliorated with a "Software Patent Hall of Shame" (SPHS), which would list software engineers complicit in software patents.

This would disincentivize software engineers from stealing ideas, from allowing their work to be patented, or from signing agreements which would force them to do so, since doing so would undermine their prospects with future employers, who believe in free and open software and unencumbered computer science research.

<comment><USER45> Not just software patents. All patents. What makes software industry so special?

<comment><USER46> Software is also protected by copyright.

<comment><USER47> Copyright only protects against actual copying. It's quite a limited right in comparison to patents. A patent can prevent others from implementing/selling/making/importing/exploiting the same invention independently created.

Copyright pales in comparison to the protection afforded by a patent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Reminds me of this cartoon:

[https://dilbert.com/strip/2006-05-06](https://dilbert.com/strip/2006-05-06)

<comment><USER49> First place I worked for had something like that except it was a supposed new customer that took their technical sales documentation and gave them to a competitor to develop a competing system. They also sent two of the competitors engineers to training sessions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Dang, it's incredible that google didn't fire the "inventors" listed on the patent. This is blatant stealing.

<comment><USER45> Why would they fire somebody for following company's policy?

<comment><USER51> It may actually be criminal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> I've been named an inventor on several patents. If I read the applications, I hardly recognize the 'art' we invented. Somehow the legalese gets derailed, or they asked somebody else (not me) to help describe it. Anyway, the patent and the idea (software organization) are hardly recognizable as related.

Note: I did not instigate the patent process. The company lawyers did. I extricated myself from the process early.

</comment><comment><USER45> Patents must be abolished.

Recommended reading: [https://www.amazon.com/Against-Intellectual-Monopoly- Michele...](https://www.amazon.com/Against-Intellectual-Monopoly-Michele- Boldrin/dp/0521127262)

<comment><USER53> And replaced with?

Industrial secrecy doesn't seem like a better system. Perhaps you'd like shorter term patents, or want to fix some other deficit?

<comment><USER54> In software it is well known that nobody reads patents who does the actual work in the field. Getting rid of them would not have a meaningful downside in the dissemination of information. Most people in the industry agree software patents are bad for the software industry and they should be abolished.

But, if that's true for software, why isn't it true for other fields? Simply put: what evidence is there patents are a benefit to society instead of a harm?

<comment><USER53> We don't have software patents (as such! [lol]) in Europe.

Software is different, in that source and decompilation exist, you can't really keep it secret.

<comment><USER55> EU has software patents. The same applications that are filed and issued in the US get filed and issued in the EU too.

Also, there is no such thing as a software patent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> You may be underestimating the sheer pressure to file patents at big tech firms. Some companies have annual filing quotas, not just for patent attorneys, but also for engineers. Not filing enough patent applications may negatively affect your performance review.

I've had patent attorneys show up on a Friday afternoon with a case of beer, to get the entire team to sit in a room and brainstorm patents. Anything goes - doesn't matter if they relate to the field you work in, since the broader company works in almost every field.

As an employee, you are specifically forbidden from googling patents, because you might become aware of prior art. As long as you aren't aware... the reasoning goes that it isn't strictly-speaking illegal.

I can't say I'm surprised that cultures like that result in the sort of thing you experienced.

</comment><comment><USER57> I'm not knowledgeable enough to talk about patents and corporations and prior art, but I did want to mention that that tech is really neat. As the parent of young kids, the intersection of storytelling, education and technology is fascinating to me, especially in the era of Youtubers and Netflix and other passive experiences.

Kudos for creating something engaging and interesting.

</comment><comment><USER58> If the author pops in here, I hope he takes a look at this patent, because it might be prior art: [https://patents.google.com/patent/US8512151](https://patents.google.com/patent/US8512151) I complained about it to the "Stupid Patent of the Month" attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (here: [https://www.eff.org/issues/stupid- patent-month](https://www.eff.org/issues/stupid-patent-month)) and got a nice response agreeing that it looks obvious.

<comment><USER59> I think the author is a she.

<comment><USER60> True, but I didn't see that she identified herself, or her gender, in the article. So what's a commenter to do? That's an honest question. Mangle to use "they"? Use some genderless pronoun that'll piss off x% of readers?

<comment><USER61> > True, but I didn't see that she identified herself, or her gender, in the > article. So what's a commenter to do?

Simple.

1\. Assume an ostensibly correct pronoun of your own choice (like you did)

2\. If someone corrects you, optionally acknowledge the correction and apologize if applicable, then use the correct pronoun henceforth

3\. Ignore the overly gender-obsessed people who tell you that you should have used ugly or cumbersome constructs such as "they" or, even worse, "s/he" and variants thereof.

4\. Don't worry too much about it; everybody can make an honest mistake.

<comment><USER62> Calling "they" an ugly or cumbersome construct seems like a reach. I am a native english speaker, and the use of that word to describe people with unknown characteristics (such as criminal suspects and people with obscured features or seen from a distance) has been very common even before the gender- obsessed people took root. It is merely english.

<comment><USER61> Fair enough, point taken. In my native tongue it doesn't work at all. I was mostly referring to the "s/he" abomination (and its variants) anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> I have heard (so very anecdotal, not confirmed), but similar stories from folks who worked with Google (not for Google).

Google would reach to incumbent telephone/infrastructure companies and tell them that they want to use their services for some super project. To get well integrated, Google, of course need to know the details/idiosyncrasy of the existing protocols/work around conventions/etc.

So Google employees would receive all the documentation, knowledge/know-how that they could extract.

Then the project would get 'cancelled'. And then, some time later, the 'service provider' would find that Google is implementing similar capabilities that their service is providing, only as part of their some other global initiative that aims at converting majority of infrastructure services to Google.

Perhaps these stories are a reflection of the internal culture characteristic of the 'Do-more-swindle' company.

I see people below recommend NDA/etc. Sure, but US/UK legal system is heavily tilted towards who can hire better lawyers -- and the monopolies win there easily....

</comment><comment><USER64> Tossing this out - lost the comment this was a reply to:

I'm not sure about that - my N=1

I went to a State school and got an economics degree, I started my career as a SQL-lackey for a B.I department in declining midwestern retailer, but I treated my career like graduate school insofar that I worked hard at it.

About 4 years after my first day of professional work, I started as a data scientist at a FANG. My team of 9 had 3 Ph.Ds (all science Ph. Ds). As I understood it, the Ph.Ds do receive higher compensation but it's not that much more (~18% higher base) and if I really kick butt, I can out earn them with bonuses.

But I think my path was much easier and lucrative. I was able to save ~$100k, I had a standard of living above that of a regular graduate student and I had flexibility that they would dream of. I made 4 years worth of contacts of my profession, I

I'm sure some Ph.Ds are worth it as investments, but if you're interested in renumeration, get working.

</comment><comment><USER65> I was assigned as an inventor for a bullshit patent application our legal team did not even understand. I did everything I could to undermine it. The whole system is fucked and is all about who has more money for lawyers (who know fuck all about the matters at hand)

</comment><comment><USER66> Google really pushes their employees to patent everything they can. During the brief time I worked there, we had multiple "patent brainstorm" meetings where we'd sit in a room and try to come up with things we could patent based on what we were working on. On top of that, they pay you a decent sum of money (low thousands, forget the exact number) for filing patents. I knew one guy who worked with various teams to file dozens of patents a year and almost doubled his salary.

That said, none of the people I knew at Google would blatantly steal other people's ideas. This sounds like a very unethical cluster of employees.

</comment><comment><USER67> Here are details of the patents filed: [https://patents.justia.com/inventor/ali-javan- javidan](https://patents.justia.com/inventor/ali-javan-javidan)

</comment><comment><USER68> Had this already 3 times that interviewers ask me out about _their_ Engineering problems, and how I would solve them. Initially I got good or very good feedback but then afterwards was rejected. It feels weird, also if I consider that they might do this with every person interviewed. Crowdsourcing knowledge through interviews, yay ;)

Seems far more appropriate to get toy problems, if that is needed at all, or to get scoped problems but then get reimbursed if it takes several hours.

<comment><USER54> I don't think there's bad intent here, just a case of the interviewer wanting to offer up a challenge and taking the one that is top of mind.

<comment><USER68> True...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> [https://www.quora.com/Do-any-companies-give-a-bonus-for- pate...](https://www.quora.com/Do-any-companies-give-a-bonus-for-patents-or- trademarks-filed-If-so-how-much/answer/Sumit-Agarwal)

> Google paid generously for filing patents to help create a defensive > portfolio.

> ...you would receive $1000 post-tax per person, up to $3k total

> I left Google in 2009 and the program may have changed since then.

(The events took place in 2014)

</comment><comment><USER70> Silicon Valley S02E02 Brain Rape

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlwwVuSUUfc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlwwVuSUUfc)

</comment><comment><USER71> Can't read the article (in the air, data constrained).

But if you have what you think is a patentable invention, file a provisional application before you interview. The USPTO gives you a filing receipt, which might help here. Let your interviewer know you can talk about your invention because you've got a patent pending. It costs $70 to file as a micro entity. See Nolo Press for a good resources on how to do it.

</comment><comment><USER72> Google is a new patent troll, IMO. Another example: Google trying to patent compression algorithm already dedicated to public domain by its inventor

[https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/9c7kw6/google_i...](https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/9c7kw6/google_is_trying_to_patent_use_of_a_data/)

</comment><comment><USER73> I'm really not surprised or upset. Its not like Google is known for using patents to crush others. The patent system is fucked up enough that they have to try to patent everything they work on and hope to either get the patent, or as in this case, prove its unpatentable through prior art.

Its a fucked up system but I don't think its as sinister people are making it out to be.

</comment><comment><USER74> I have often thought... "I have an idea; If I search using Google, and not really find anything relevant, does 'google' ever look at everyones 'ideas' and 'send these off to the labs to investigate further for possible patents? How would you ever know?

I'm putting on my tin-hat now!

</comment><comment><USER22> This comes up a bunch and if researchers want to research w/o having people sit on the sidelines and cherry pick obvious extensions to ideas, then you need to basically brainstorm in public and do so aggressively.

I would suggest having a weekly or monthly brainstorming session over vide chat, or have a wiki or emailing list with a meadow of ideas. Provide that email list as an immutable publicicly indexed and crawlable content.

Put the minutes of those meetings on line, upload the video of the "idea jam sessions" to Youtube, Vimeo, etc.

After a small amount of time, you will stake out ownership of enough avenues of research that it will be hard to patent anything. You don't have to build something to patent it, it doesn't even have to be buildable, meaning you can actually patent "problems" instead of solutions.

Thoughts?

</comment><comment><USER75> This is awfully scummy. I'd seen it in Silicon Valley (the show) and I laughed then; seeing it play out in real life is sobering.

<comment><USER76> If you want to understand Silicon Valley, watch _" Silicon Valley"_ \- Bill Gates

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> There's a subtle-but-sneaky way to play this game.

Put in a patent application. Abandon it.

Congratulations, your patent is now going to come up in any competent patent examiner's initial search as "potential prior art".

Patent the core technology (the "you have to do it this way" stuff), but salt the earth around it so nobody can get a patent on the sub-optimal alternatives.

Also leave subtle but important details out of the application. Your conductive ink is silver but has to have, say, palladium added to make it stable? Forget to mention the palladium, and expand the claims to cover mixtures of different metals. See if the examiner allows it.

<comment><USER77> What you describe is the standard in some industries. If a research team discovers something new, lawyers will make a patent out of it that is broad / vague enough to prevent any further research in that area by competitors. At the same time they look at the patents of competitors and if they are too specific they try to patent similar ideas.

<comment><USER24> > If a research team discovers something new, lawyers will make a patent out > of it that is broad / vague enough to prevent any further research in that > area by competitors.

Not quite right. If an inventor creates something marginally useful at a large company, there's no question that their lawyers will try to patent it. But the purpose is not to prevent research in the area, in fact the opposite. Once a company has a patent on something, they'd likely encourage further research, knowing that they have a financial interest in the research going to market.

All big companies do this, and once the research matures enough to become a product, all the companies have modest claim to it, but they all have an interest to bringing it to market. In some cases, these companies fight who gets what in court (e.g., CRISPR), but in others, they come together and agree on a royalty scheme roughly proportional to their contributions (e.g., MPEG, H.264).

The point is, no company patents something to stop research on that thing, it's quite the opposite.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> It bothers me when there's no author or timestamp on an article.

<comment><USER79> See the end of the article, not the top.

<comment><USER78> She added that, probably in response to my comment and others like it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER80> The intended conclusion isn't explcitly stated, so: _private_ sharing enables this danger; _public_ sharing prevents it, aka _publishing_.

<comment><USER81> If only it were that easy. The largest cloud company has a core component of their strategy monetization of open source. I haven't heard them paying royalties to the people that developed the software.

</comment></comment><comment><USER82> Why anyone can still stand up for Google as a company is beyond me. They are just scum who got a foothold on the internet at the right time.

</comment><comment><USER83> Any Googler who is willing to comment on this here ?

<comment><USER84> They only show up in threads praising Google as a utopia.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> What are the open-source licenses that would prevent someone from patenting my ideas?

(or if a shorter list, what are the licenses that wouldn't?)

</comment><comment><USER85> I wonder if a first line of defense could be to license the work as AGPL. Google would then probably not use it AFAIK

<comment><USER39> Wont prevent them from trying [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/08/after- patent-office-re...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/08/after-patent- office-rejection-it-time-google-abandon-its-attempt-patent-use-public)

</comment></comment><comment><USER86> Did the offer any moral or ethics explanation? How did they justify this on a human level? That always interests me about this sort of decision, surely they had many meetings on the topic, what would those minutes look like?

</comment><comment><USER87> This sort of thing keeps me up at night as we shop for investors for our saas product. They have the money to just implement our ideas and what we show them from our beta, and most of them are in the same general space.

</comment><comment><USER88> How is this thread at the bottom of the front page with 1535 votes and only 15hs?

Google brigade?

</comment><comment><USER89> I'm curious if this idea is that unique -- The Exploratorium published a book called "The Art of Tinkering" in 2014 that has paper circuits that seem very similar to the authors concept.

<comment><USER79> That's the author's point -- she was working in a field where there was plenty of active work going on, but after meeting with google, the big G tried to patent it.

<comment><USER89> Well, if the Exploratorium published a book using paper circuits before Google applied for the patent, is this prior art?

<comment><USER79> Infuriatingky, it's pretty hard to use non-patent sources as prior art under the US system!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER90> >An inventor is the one credited with coming up with the idea for an invention. The assignee actually gets the legal rights to the patent.

I assumed there was something like that but interesting to see it drawn out.

</comment><comment><USER91> 30 years ago, I implemented pie menus at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab, and the UMD Office of Technology Liaison wanted me to patent them, but I decided not to, and I don't regret it. The patent would have been assigned to a little patent trolling company that UMD has a parasitic relationship with, and very little of the money would have ever found its way back to me or the University.

[https://medium.com/@donhopkins/pie- menus-936fed383ff1?source...](https://medium.com/@donhopkins/pie- menus-936fed383ff1?source=your_stories_page</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>---)

But that's not the worst problem patenting pie menus would have caused:

If I'd patented them, it would have effectively prevented me from using them myself in subsequent proprietary and open source projects, like The NeWS Toolkit, TCL/Tk, The Sims, SimCity, Unity3D, etc.

Convincing Sun or Electronic Arts or any other employer or client to license a patented user interface interaction technique instead of using an inferior freely available one would have been a non-starter, as would have been using it in any open source projects.

It was only because I didn't file a patent that I was able to freely implement pie menus for NeWS at Sun, and use them in SimCity and The Sims.

You're not always going to be working for the same company or attending the same school for the rest of your life, so it's not a good idea to hand over all the rights to your ideas to them, because you'll have to pay if you ever want to use them again yourself. But if you give them away to everyone for free, you get to use them yourself after you leave, and they're free for everyone to use in open source projects.

>Open Sourcing SimCity: Chaim Gingold's "Play Design" PhD Thesis: "Pie menus play a critical role in The Sim's user interface design, dovetailing perfectly with the object and AI architecture. Objects advertise verbs to character AI, so it is natural for the verbs to be arranged in a radial menu about objects. I can't imagine an alternate design that would have had the same widespread usability, and therefore appeal, without them. It is difficult to imagine The Sims without pie menus." -Chaim Gingold, Play Design PhD Thesis, Open Sourcing SimCity

[https://medium.com/@donhopkins/open-sourcing- simcity-58470a2...](https://medium.com/@donhopkins/open-sourcing- simcity-58470a275446)

Unfortunately other people filed misleading patents around pie menus that should never have been granted, because they tried to retroactively redefine what pie menus were by ignoring published prior art, and coined a new term "marking menu" which they defined by a straw man comparison to their self- servingly gerrymandered misunderstanding of pie menus.

So they ended up patenting fictitious "differences" between "marking menus" and "pie menus" that weren't really differences: obvious features pie menus had always had, and that I'd written about and demonstrated in SIGCHI videos, but they'd conveniently ignored, because they needed to trick the patent office into thinking those properties were unique to "marking menus".

Then they misleadingly and systematically used those patents as FUD for decades in their marketing brochures, advertisements, and word of mouth from their sales people on trade show floors. They purposefully discouraged other companies like Kinetix and open source projects like Blender from doing anything remotely resembling pie menus, whether or not they actually infringed on their patents.

[https://medium.com/@donhopkins/pie-menu-fud-and- misconceptio...](https://medium.com/@donhopkins/pie-menu-fud-and- misconceptions-be8afc49d870)

Huge Problem: Software Patents and FUD

Autodesk Advertisement About "Patented Marking Menus": "Marking Menus. Quickly select commands without looking away from the design. Patented marking menus let you use context-sensitive gestures to select commands."

[http://images.autodesk.com/adsk/files/aliasdesign10_detail_b...](http://images.autodesk.com/adsk/files/aliasdesign10_detail_bro_us.pdf)

There is a sad history of people using software patents to make misleading claims about obvious techniques that they didn't originate, and constructing flawed straw man definitions of ersatz pie menus to contrast with their own inventions, to mislead the patent examiners into granting patents.

There is a financial and institutional incentive to be lazy about researching and less than honest in reporting and describing prior art, in the hopes that it will slip by the patent examiners, which it very often does.

[...]

The Alias Marking Menu Patent Discouraged the Open Source Blender Community from Using Pie Menus for Decades

Here is another example that of how that long term marketing FUD succeeded in holding back progress: the Blender community was discussing when the marking menu patent would expire, in anticipation of when they might finally be able to use marking menus in blender (even though it has always been fine to use pie menus).

As the following discussion shows, there is a lot of purposefully sewn confusion and misunderstanding about the difference between marking menus and pie menus, and what exactly is patented, because of the inconsistent and inaccurate definitions and mistakes in the papers and patents and Alias's marketing FUD:

"Hi. In a recently closed topic regarding pie menus, LiquidApe said that marking menus are a patent of Autodesk, a patent that would expire shortly. The question is: When ? When could marking menus be usable in Blender ? I couldn't find any info on internet, mabie some of you know."

</comment><comment><USER92> stuff like this makes me so damn angry. It so scummy and is completely against the spirit of innovation and sharing.

</comment><comment><USER93> Right from the 80s Microsoft playbook.

</comment><comment><USER94> Google is also fetching ideas for code and patents from publicly streamed hackathons around the world.

<comment><USER39> at least they arent murdering people for the code, yet, afaik

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antitrust_(film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antitrust_\(film\))

</comment></comment><comment><USER95> If you think they aren't trying to steal your ideas if you use their products you're nuts.

</comment><comment><USER96> What happened probably, interviewer wanted to credit himselve.

A company is made out of humans

</comment><comment><USER97> Hi Everyone! This is Jie, the author of the original post on patentpandas.org. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and experiences on this thread! I thought it might be helpful for you all to know the full story and give some more context:

The original post is actually one of TWO patent-related issues that simultaneously happened to me.

The first one was when my crowdfunding campaign backer _successfully_ patented our LED stickers product ([https://patentpandas.org/stories/crowdfunding- backer-patente...](https://patentpandas.org/stories/crowdfunding-backer- patented-my-project)) despite us having a successful crowdfund, lots of press, research papers dating back to 2011 and an entire business by then.

And then it was about a month after I found out about the LED stickers patent, I found out that Google ATAP was trying to patent work that I had shared during the job interview ([https://patentpandas.org/stories/company-patented- my-idea](https://patentpandas.org/stories/company-patented-my-idea)).

While I can understand why the google story is getting more attention, in many ways it's actually the other story that's more problematic, because in that case, the faulty patent application actually passed muster at the USPTO and issued as a patent.

This all happened during my last year of grad school at MIT, in the months before I defended my thesis and graduated. And it _absolutely sucked_!

But in the end, I was pretty lucky that both situations turned out okay(ish). The most important bit was that I had support from all these law clinics, and my own giant institution (MIT), to help me navigate. But I can already see from this thread that many others out there aren't so lucky.

The absurdity of these situations, and that they were happening to me at the same time, got me to spend the next couple years learning about patent law at the Berkman Klein Center ([https://cyber.harvard.edu](https://cyber.harvard.edu)). My hope was that I could better understand how the heck all this happened, and to see if I could do something to help other creators out.

That's why I started Patentpandas.org - to have a place to share these patent stories, to help by showing how others navigated their patent problems, and (for folks like my former self) to show that it's not so scary to work with lawyers and wade into patent law! That's also why we're using panda comics to illustrate patent law concepts. Pandas: definitely not scary :)

My hope is that if more creators out there better understand patent law and are connected with pro bono lawyers when they need help, then patent trolls and others who have more legal resources at their disposal won't be able to get away with things like this so easily.

BTW, I shared all this during my talk for the Patent Pandas launch last week. In case you're curious to check it out: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfCYOWVQehA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfCYOWVQehA)

Thanks, Jie

</comment><comment><USER98> Something very similar happened to me.

When I was at university studying CS I was running a Arduino fansite and a fansite for a videogame - both of whom made most of their money from affiliate revenue (a couple hundred bucks per month).

I thought it would be cool to work at Reddit (was close to graduating), and I had read blog posts from here and various other sites and IRC about how hiring managers liked projects.

I took to it to build a JS library that converted links to affiliate links, for example amazon and some other small retailers I had used.

Basically you just parse any URL you embed in the page with this library and it would convert the existing (non-affiliate) links to affiliate links with your signature attached so you got a revenue share.

In addition to this, I had done research on Reddit's traffics and crawled reddit to see how many affiliate-capable links existed. I talked about this in the interview and suggested they could make around 2 million per month if they hired me and used my script.

\--> I was rejected after the interview, but a couple months later Reddit announced it was experimenting with a new feature that would re-write links as affiliate. They ended up implementing this feature that I am 95% sure I came up with and someone else stole.

It was one of the shittiest experiences I have ever had interviewing, especially since I didn't get a job out of it but I believe they have made millions off of this idea so far.

I huge put off, but I've learned since then backstabbing and stealing ideas is a big part of politics in most corporations. What a bummer.

<comment><USER99> On the specific idea: The idea is not unique, and really low hanging fruit for a mass site.

<comment><USER98> At the time, I could not find a single social media site that was using link- rewriting to make affiliate money.

Blogs and fan sites for niche products had been using this to make money for a while, social media sites had not yet tried it.

The close proximity with the announcement and my interview is what really bothered me. I have a strong feeling (but cannot prove) that someone I interviewed with took the idea and ran with it. I had done a lot of research into how much money Reddit would make off of this and how to implement it at scale without breaking existing affiliate links and such.

I had literally planned it as my pitch for what I wanted to work on and why they should hire me.

<comment><USER100> We did that at Bagcheck in 2010. It was super common. They may have taken your idea and ran with it but it wasn't a novel idea. Generally though, at scale, you run into problems with the affiliate programs and they cut you off.

<comment><USER28> Is affiliate stuffing adding any value? In most cases, it doesn't seem to drive more customers towards the business paying the affiliate commission.

<comment><USER100> It might. For example, it was one of the potential revenue sources for Bagcheck to keep it running such that people could post their product reviews to the service. Without that revenue it is possible it isn't feasible to run the service and that would decrease the number of reviews pointing to them which could reduce the number of sales they get.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER101> Didn't Google try to do this with ANS also?

</comment><comment><USER102> Addressing any shock and revulsion following this story:

Because capitalist organizations are literally founded upon the act of constant appropriation of the surplus value created by their own employees, it's not reasonable to expect these organizations to somehow indulge a higher standard of treatment toward outside persons who aren't even their employees, to persons who are just dropping by to share ideas and work. Such organizations will seize with both hands whatever of value is presented to them. They seize, that's what they do. All day, every day.

</comment><comment><USER103> Just because you are giant, isn't it!

</comment><comment><USER104> Don't be evil.

Oops

<comment><USER105> If you have to harm someone, is Google the best choice? Have they asked for moral opprobrium?

The situation certainly seems like it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER106> If your country has "democratic" in the name it's probably not democratic. If your major has "science" in the name it's probably not science. If your company has "don't be evil" in its motto...

<comment><USER107> So Computer Science is Engineering?

<comment><USER108> computer science is math

<comment><USER109> engineering is math too, math is eating everything, oh noes!

but not really, that's software after all. engineering is applied math, so largely software modeling, whereas CS is theoretical work. abstract problems, pure solutions.

<comment><USER110> > engineering is applied math

It's applied math _and_ applied science. The science informs how to apply the math, since the math is a model of natural phenomena. In fact, most of the math came to engineering via the science.

<comment><USER111> I would argue that CS and type theory explores the very foundations of math.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER112> Leah Buechley is the PhD advisor, Regina Dugan is Google ATAP, Joi Ito is Media Lab but... who is the first person speaker of the text?

Am I missing something obvious or is it really omitted?

Edit: possibly (probably?) [https://twitter.com/qijie](https://twitter.com/qijie)

<comment><USER113> It's very interesting that she is launching the PandaPatents site using her story as the impetus to help people navigate patent law. I haven't had time to look at it, but it sounds like an interesting idea.

<comment><USER114> I hope this catches on - it looks like there's already a second good story on the HN frontpage, about patent issues with crowdfunding.

I'm always impressed at how big a difference it can make to go from "people know this is a problem" to "there's a central place to see what this problem looks like and how much damage it can cause".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER115> Aside from toxic corporate culture as exposed by James Damore, this is another reason never to associate with "Alphabet Corp" as a professional. Good riddance!

</comment><comment><USER116> Headline says "Company". Article says "Google". Is this being softened in Google's favor?

<comment><USER117> I think it's the other way around? I don't know why the article says 'company' but we changed the HN headline to 'Google' after it was posted here last night.

<comment><USER116> yeah I didn't mean HN was softening it; the article itself was softening it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER118> > More importantly, sharing work publicly keeps the project can alive and > inspires others to continue developing!

Which a patent does too, just with a license or 20 years later. It keeps people from reinventing the wheel and gives the disclosure rights even if they didn't have the infrastructure to create or monetize on their own. This isn't one of those nefarious software patents where the whole thing would be obsolete within 5 years, this is LED books, which simply becomes more feasible as transistor sizes shrink and battery technology improves, perfect for a 20 year exclusivity period before falling into the public domain where it can be vastly more practical to create in 2033.

<comment><USER119> > [a] patent [keeps thhe project alive] too

> perfect for a 20 year exclusivity period

So for 20 years, if I wish to create and sell a book with transistors I have to license the idea from google (that is if they're even willing to give me a license)?

And somehow having to go through that legal loophole will keep the art of creating LED books alive? You seriously believe that?

Does the patent have complex details which would take longer than 20 years for someone to independently discover about creating LED books? If so, people do save time by waiting 20 years and then reading the patent, but that seems extremely unlikely.

<comment><USER118> > So for 20 years, if I wish to create and sell a book with transistors I have > to license the idea from google (that is if they're even willing to give me > a license)?

No. Google wasn't supposed to try and patent it.

I responded to a very specific piece of the article which seemed to ignore that patent applications functioning as prior art is available to subculture enthusiasts too.

The whole concluding paragraph was about making ideas that other people can build from, it wasn't about LED books in general. They want ideas to be available for others to build from but don't want others to patent it, ignoring that attempting to patent it yourself also fixes this, no matter how you actually use the patent or failed/abandoned application.

(Although, I'll concede that patenting is an expensive bet that not everyone would have the money or risk tolerance for.)

<comment><USER120> The problems with patents as prior art for new inventions are manifold:

\- The common advice is for practitioners to avoid learning about existing patents, because this knowledge increases liability in case you are found to infringe. This means that the body of patented work is really only useful for patent lawyers, rather than for inventors.

\- Similarly, patents are not written in ways to instruct practitioners to use techniques, but instead crafted in legal terms to claim broad areas of application while skirting previously filed patent claims. This again makes the patent library only useful to lawyers.

\- In areas where patents are not common, there is a green field for patent applications that patent common techniques. This happened in software and business methods, and the article suggests it is happening in the junction of enthusiasts and crafts.

<comment><USER53> Hmm, being aware that you're infringing a patent, and continuing to do it anyway, is of course bad legally speaking.

But inventors not using parent literature is catastrophically bad. So many applications are repeated, in some fields the same thing is "invented" over and over because people don't even makea cursory attempt to understand the technology in the field vs the products available.

Being unaware of infringement, but not by willful negligence, is actually a defence against an award of damages in the UK. Precisely to protect this fundamental tier of the patent system.

If people can't use the disclosures then the system serves virtually no purpose.

<comment><USER120> > If people can't use the disclosures then the system serves virtually no > purpose.

That's not quite true - although disclosure is an often argued benefit of the patent system, there are very few inventions that cannot be copied once a working item is in someone's hands, so a formal disclosure is not necessarily required to be able to build upon and extend existing work.

But even without disclosure, when appropriate patents are granted, they can "[secure] for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries" even if the patent library is not useful for research.

<comment><USER53> Yes, I was a little terse there: what I meant was the system serves little purpose for the _demos_ who maintain it. The deal is that the inventors get their monopoly in return for the disclosure. So, without any benefit on the side of the public then their would be no purpose in maintaining the system.

Of course it also serves the public to encourage inventors by giving them a limited exclusive use. But primarily when instigated the purpose is a mutual benefit that is best embodied by education of the public arena as to the mechanisms and working of an invention.

<comment><USER120> > Of course it also serves the public to encourage inventors by giving them a > limited exclusive use.

Yes.

> But primarily when instigated the purpose is a mutual benefit that is best > embodied by education of the public arena as to the mechanisms and working > of an invention.

This is the debate - how significant is the "education" aspect in promoting progress and public benefit? Is incentivizing new creation sufficient to promote progress without the (lacking) education aspect?

Then the whole question of whether the limited monopolies really create those incentives or just magnify profits that would already exist and open the door for abuse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER121> Just a reminder that Google, or any company for that matter, has a fiduciary duty towards their shareholders to file a patent for everything they have learned about and that hasn't been patented yet.

<comment><USER120> There's a common myth that companies have "a fiduciary duty" to make as much money as possible (especially short-term), but this has no basis in law in the US.

[https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme- court/13-354.html](https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/13-354.html) "modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not do so... a for- profit corporation may take costly pollution-control and energy-conservation measures that go beyond what the law requires. A for-profit corporation that operates facilities in other countries may exceed the requirements of local law regarding working conditions and benefits. "

[https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are- co...](https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-corporations- obligations-to-shareholders/corporations-dont-have-to-maximize-profits) "companies that maximize profits by firing employees, avoiding taxes, selling shoddy products or polluting the environment can harm their shareholders more than helping them."

<comment><USER37> Thing is, if a CEO doesn't pursue profit and shareholder dividends above all else, they probably won't last long until the investors and board members vote them out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER122> I and my friends had a similar experience too.

</comment><comment><USER123> So now we are pointing fingers at Google every day? Are they the new Muslims or Russians?

</comment><comment><USER124> It could just be people independently working on the same things, as is common in technology.

<comment><USER119> For the purpose of a patent, that doesn't help.

"Independent creation" is a valid defense for copyright, but not for patents.

Something cannot be patented if prior art exists before the filing of the patent. It doesn't matter if you knew about it. Even if you can prove that the prior art is not something you were aware of at the time you filed for a patent, your patent is invalid.

That's how patents are supposed to work; inventions must be "non-obvious" to the point where no one else has ever created it nor described it before on the entire planet.

If google knows that someone else has created such things (as they must have after said visit), the only responsible thing to do is not file a patent, regardless of if they independently worked on it.

<comment><USER53> >If google knows that someone else has created such things (as they must have after said visit), the only responsible thing to do is not file a patent, regardless of if they independently worked on it. //

A job interview is not a public disclosure and so doesn't count as prior art. So novelty is not affected.

However, the applicant must derive rights (employment, assignment) from the inventor in order to apply for a patent.

In UK IIRC S.13 of the Patents Act allows an inventor to file to be named as the inventor (or co-inventor) and for the patent to be reassigned accordingly.

Of course taking Google to court is going to be a hard slog.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> > "oh there's way too much prior art" and this patent can't pass

afaiu, US patent office (as opposed to European) is much more relaxed about giving away patents and relies more on courts to settle disputes after the fact. That is an American patent is more likely to be revoked.

</comment><comment><USER125> The story talks about a patent. The search on the first listed inventor brings 5 of his applications on various aspects of these electronically enriched books all almost simultaneously (after he invented additive manufacturing) - Google I suppose have nice bonuses for patents and skillful patent layers.

</comment><comment><USER126> I believe this was an honest misunderstanding and not an attempt to steal the idea because if the patent had issued and become valuable, it would have been easily invalidated.

If a company wants to steal your patent they will "surround" your idea with other patents: method of manufacturing <idea>, method of using <idea> in <industry>, <idea> used in adjacent use case. This is a legal but slimy way to force the sale of your idea since now only they can profitably commercialize it.

<comment><USER127> > I believe this was an honest misunderstanding and not an attempt to steal > the idea because if the patent had issued and become valuable, it would have > been easily invalidated.

"Easily", if you have deep pockets to foot all the legal costs.

Big companies know this, hence I don't think it was an innocent misunderstanding. The fact that they wouldn't even add OP as an assignee on the patent just reinforces my view that they were acting in bad faith.

OP was lucky to catch this before the patent was issued.

<comment><USER126> There is no way a company would assign a patent they filed. Maybe they would give a low or no cost license to use it

<comment><USER127> How generous of them!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER128> On a certain level, it makes sense. Google wants to patent it to cover their bases and make sure no one else does the same thing and blocks _them_. It's a rational move in a shitty game.

<comment><USER129> "Rational move". Think about that for a second. Morally wrong doesn't really reach anyone's mind these days.

<comment><USER130> How would it look if someone else got the patent and completely blocked Google? It's not even a question for large companies. The issue is this archaic patent and copyright system where someone "owns" an idea... Absurd.

<comment><USER131> This type of argument doesn't stand here. Since the truth is that there is prior art, and the right thing to do is to make sure nobody got the patent, google could have make sure _nobody_ get the patent.

Ironically that's what they ended up doing, but i doubt it was on purpose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER132> > I was even invited to share my work directly with Regina Dugan, the director > of ATAP at that time! I was excited, thinking perhaps I would be invited for > a summer internship. It turned out they found my work so relevant that they > offered me a job on the spot.

> It was a tough choice: I had just started the first year of my PhD and > would've had to take a leave from the program to pursue this project. After > asking many people, the advice was clear: stay in school. So I decided to > turn down the offer and continue pursuing my PhD.

...this sounds like terrible advice? I have to wonder whether any of the "many people" consulted weren't professors.

<comment><USER133> It's almost always better to achieve for yourself instead of others. A PhD. is infinitely more valuable than a couple of years working for any company, especially if your subject is interesting enough to on-spot hire you before you finish.

And I say that as a manager who's hired a lot of people before they earned X because their work was interesting. I don't do it anymore, as a rule, because it crushed a lot of those people with regret later and I have to live with that.

<comment><USER134> Why did it crush them? Shouldn't the job they agreed to take with you have set them up for success? Or did they not perform well and find themselves unemployed?

<comment><USER133> I think it's easiest to explain like this.

You don't get a lot of opportunities to earn a PhD, most people never get the chance. By comparison almost everyone in CS get a lot of truly great job opportunities in their lives.

That's a PhD, we had a habit of hiring people before their finished they CS degrees because skilled people were so hard to come by back in the day. They have good careers as far as I know, but they would have had much better opportunities if they had finished their degrees, and some of them haven't taken that well.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


3D printing at home - <AUTHOR> http://cubify.com/

<comment><USER2> An expensive toy that prints more toys :)

Regarding the site, these guys should educate themselves on asset concatenation (44 javascript files in head tag). Can't help myself :)</comment>


Comcast announces IPv6 trials to begin in 2010 - <AUTHOR> http://www.comcast6.net/

<comment><USER2> It's about time. IPv6 talk has been around for years, it's nice to see a major ISP actually seriously testing it.</comment>


Net neutrality activist 'throttles' street traffic outside FCC building - <AUTHOR> https://thenextweb.com/creative/2018/01/29/net-neutrality-activist-throttles-street-outside-fcc-building/ <comment><USER2> unfortunately the number of points I can give this is throttled</comment>


Ask HN: Should professional data be signed? - <AUTHOR> I would like to propose that every frame of production-grade material should be signed. Every frame from a photojournalist's camera should be signed. Every frame from an speaker, journalist, author microphone or pick-up should be signed. This has been done at the high end from the beginning: doctors sign their notes, engineers sign their drawings, artists sign their paintings. Developers now sign their code. And it's possible that content that's being put out with the assertion that society should pay your for it, should be signed as close to the sensor as possible. Every manipulation should be signed. And the whole network of signatures should be traceable. Ultimately, we're going to need this.
What I'm not talking about is your personal iPhone's pictures. The bar to entry to society should be low. The bar to entry in the professions should be high.
Ideally, the browser should show a broken lock whenever the page you're reading has broken content, that is, content where the chain of signatures accumulated in production has been broken, or is backed by a root certificate you don't trust.
Let's take lab results. A variety of Congressional laws establish some inspection regimes over labs that produce data for human medical treatment. Should not the FDA sign a de novo or 510(k) certificate for the manufacturer? And then the manufacturer signs the machine as an intermediary. Medical societies and the state licensing boards similarly sign for the pathologists that run the labs. The pathologist running the lab, receiving the machine, should then countersign the certificate that machine uses to sign further intermediaries for regular QA periods. As QA processes are performed, the governing body (FDA, CAP, etc) can countersign as survey results are entered and pass. Then the machine, which passed QC within the last 24 hours (signed for by an authorized tech) signs the results. So you have confidence all the way to the result of who did what, from the original scientific paper to the result for the patient in the ER. In my mind this seems obvious. Why isn't it done already? <comment><USER2> It's all too hard and usage never hit critical mass. Eg. why didn't you sign this post with your PGP key?

Hopefully it will become more mainstream one day. Perhaps the increase of faked images/video/etc. and the interest in blockchain for immutable records will start producing some change.</comment>


Show HN: Directus – Free and Open-Source Headless CMS - <AUTHOR> http://getdirectus.com/ <comment><USER2> What is the difference with for example Active Admin (for Ruby on Rails)?

<comment><AUTHOR> Certainly similar in concept. Other than the server-side language, the biggest difference seems to be how it saves the actual data. AA has file-based exports (csv, json, etc), not seeing a relational datastore (maybe Mongo?) – Directus is built on top of your custom-schema SQL database so it scales with large/complex datasets.

Also, while AA has a good set of simple features, Directus has comprehensive user management ACL, more robust file control, and is generally a bit more full-featured.

AA looks like a good option though, going to check it out in more detail! Thanks...

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> What's the benefit of a headless CMS?

<comment><AUTHOR> A headless (or decoupled) CMS is one that only manages content, as opposed to most "CMS" out there now that overreach by managing your views, templates, logic, routing, etc. That means that most current "CMS" are built specifically for websites only (more specifically, blogs), however a headless CMS only manages the data itself, and therefore is appropriate for anything from native apps, content syndications, interactive walls, or other data-driven projects. In fact a more important distinction is that it can manage content for MULTIPLE clients, for example a project where an app, widget, and website all pull the same content.

Since the content is decoupled from the application/view you access your data through an API or SDK. For Directus, you can use our API, one of our language SDKs, or just connect to the database directly. That gives developers freedom over their workflow, process, libraries, and database architecture – which can expedite development and optimize performance.</comment></comment>


Netflix Offers Unlimited Streaming As iTunes Rental Spoiler - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/13/netflix-offers-unlimited-streaming-as-itunes-rental-spoiler/ <comment><USER2> The problem with Netflix's online streaming business isn't time caps, but lack of selection.

Currently their "watch it now" list is heavily weighted towards classics and foreign films. Very seldom does it contain new releases or movies I'd ordinarily think to add to my queue.

Additionally the online streaming feature only works in IE for Windows, which is a pain (for me).

I guess it remains to be seen what, if anything, Apple is going to bring to the table, but there are obvious opportunities to improve on the Netflix model.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you want to see posts for start up gigs? - <AUTHOR>

Bootstrapping my third start up (Healthcare mobile s/w and IT) through offering myself as a start up consultant. Simple question, Do people want/need to see this here? I'm more than willing to share expertise with anyone, just offering great help for reasonable pay. <comment><USER2> I haven't been keeping track of it, but is there still a "looking for/selling freelance work" thread that accompanies the "who's hiring" thread at the start of each month?

If so, that's probably the most appropriate place for it. (If not, you could start such a thread at the same time.)

There have been several front-page threads of people offering free office hours and/or some kind of free service, but even that got some argument over whether it might be too self-promoting of the posters.

Generally, there are _lots_ of companies and individuals that want to sell services to HN users, but we really aren't interested in seeing them as posts unless it's something really ground-breaking in its own right.

[Edit: side note -- if you have lots of good advice to give to startups, you might offer it in discussions here -- this can give you a sort of portfolio to share with prospective clients. And in at least one case I know of, a frequent HN commenter was basically begged by many clients to start doing consulting like you're talking about, because he so clearly had advice worth sharing. YMMV.]

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you - that's great advice - I've been a fan of this site for some years now - posting occasionally. I'm also painfully aware of a lot of people trying to sell services ( annoying - I get these a lot on my own blog and biz email), I just thought that so many of these young start ups could use some advice to build business models, create marketing programs, or just plain have an objective third party to bounce ideas off. Too many good ideas don't get the traction they deserve, and too many bad ones drag on for too long in my opinion. My goal, is more to help and make some side income while I build my own business - so far all the investments I've had are entirely to feed my developers - I've raised money from friends and family and I refuse to spend it for anything other than building the business they invested in. Once I get some revenue then I'll justify taking a salary, but not while I'm in development.

Thanks for your thoughts - I am sensitive to the purpose and value of HN, I don't want to see it overrun with Craigslist -type offers either.</comment></comment>


Machine Learning in R, in a nutshell - <AUTHOR> http://blog.revolution-computing.com/2009/09/machine-learning-in-r-in-a-nutshell.html <comment><USER2> Anyone have an idea how R and Matlab compare?

I've only worked with Matlab and it's great for putting together library functions but horrible for writing any functions yourself. Is R any better?

<comment><USER3> Difficult question. I know that Matlab has some very strong Machine Learning libraries which make it extremely convenient to experiment. As much as I like GNU R and FOSS in this case I would say Matlab has the upper hand.

For one it has a huge userbase which posts code examples and solutions to various problems. Another being that Matlab has nice Machine Learning libraies in my opinion.

There are e.g. some interesting video lectures from stanford about this topic by Andrew Ng <http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs229/> && <http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=A89DCFA6ADACE599> )

In the first lecture the question comes up and he has the same opinion.

I think eventually GNU R will be better but that will still take some time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Speaking of machine learning, does anyone have any potential start-up ideas involving it that they are not going to implement themselves?

<comment><USER5> If anyone had machine learning startup ideas that _would_ implement themselves, Eliezer Yudkowsky would probably be interested.

Tangentially, there seem to be a lot of computer vision startups--there's a company called Cortexica with an unreleased iPhone wine label identifier, and Evernote's nonpareil handwriting recognition makes me wish its algorithm were open; open-source alternatives seem to focus only on printed text.</comment></comment>


Zorbage: Algebraic data types and algorithms for use in numeric processing - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/bdezonia/zorbage <comment><AUTHOR> [https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/eafy2p/zorbage...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/eafy2p/zorbage_numerical_computing_in_procedural_java/)</comment>


Tesla Q4 2019 Vehicle Production and Deliveries - <AUTHOR> https://ir.tesla.com/news-releases/news-release-details/tesla-q4-2019-vehicle-production-deliveries <comment><USER2> I love my Model 3.

Yes, its "luxury" is not up to the price. Sure, the customer service sucks. Yeah, repairs take a long time.

But for me, when I ride in a Tesla, I get a giddy feeling, like the first time I held an iPhone. You just _know_ it's the future. There are so many radical, bold, and _correct_ ideas. Every time I get a software update I'm a kid on Christmas morning. It is just such a fun experience, and for those of you who love to be on the bleeding edge, you'd probably love it too.

It's not a car for everyone but I get the same feeling about Tesla as I did about Apple when they came out with the iPhone. 8 years later and no company has managed to come up with a car that seriously competes with the 2012 Model S. Tesla was the first to market and remains the market leader. They've solidified their position in the minds of Americans. They have a grand vision and they're executing on it. This company is headed to the moon.

<comment><USER3> I would consider a Tesla if it offered CarPlay. And I would prefer tactile controls instead of that hideous tablet.

<comment><USER4> It's funny, people often compare Tesla (or electric cars in general) to the transition to iPhones from our flip phones and the complaints are the exact same: "I would prefer tactile controls"

<comment><USER3> I would consider the fact that one's eyes should be on the road while driving to make the complaints slightly different.

<comment><USER5> Do you really use dashboard buttons or knobs without looking? I can't.

Steering wheel buttons / stalk controls I can use without looking, but Tesla has those as well.

<comment><USER6> I might glance quickly to find where the knob is, but I don't have to keep my eye on it to grab it, nor (more importantly) to adjust it to where I want it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is impressive, but the most impressive part is that Tesla will likely grow another 50% in the coming year given their guidance.

Tesla China can now produce 3k cars a week, let's extrapolate that to the year at a really conservative 2k, which results in about 100k extra cars annually. The same can be expected from the model Y ramp which according to Tesla rumors is already well under way, given that it's effectively the same process as the model 3.

All while not being legally allowed to sell in half of the USA due to outdated car dealership rules, I'd expect this trend to continue given their product roadmap. If they can keep this trend going for 10 years, they'll be the largest car manufacture in the world. Hah kidding, that would just be impossible to keep up for so long.

<comment><USER8> On a separate note, I've been wondering how Tesla's relationship with China will affect Starlink. When I first learned about Musk's satellite internet plans, I was optimistic that it could bring unfettered internet access to the billion+ people subject to aggressive internet censorship. Now I doubt Musk will go against a country that is providing over a 1/5th of his car sales.

<comment><USER9> Starlink is done by SpaceX, not Tesla.

<comment><USER10> Why do you think China will make that distinction?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The auto industry is really going to go through some changes in the next decade. It wouldn't surprise me if a few majors like GM, Ford, BMW, Mercedes, Chrysler, Nissan. etc are still around or on their way out. At this point Tesla seems to be doing better every month while other manufacturers just can't mount a serious challenge when it comes to EV's. The more time that passes, the stronger Tesla seems to get.

<comment><USER12> This EV transition will likely wipe a few out, for sure. It's hard to imagine how the pension burdened American co's will survive. But Tesla actually _lost_ market share quarter-over-quarter in the US. It's a rough market for autos right now.

<comment><USER13> Say what? Where did you see that? Autos overall are down, Tesla is selling record numbers, how did they lose market share?

<comment><USER12> > _Autos overall are down, Tesla is selling record numbers, how did they lose > market share?_

Tesla's revenues as a percentage of total auto sales decreased last quarter. Simple math.

<comment><USER13> Please cite sources or numbers. As I understand it global auto sales are down and Tesla is up, so simple math would not support your claim. If you have evidence, please present it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I thought Elon tweeted early last year that Tesla was on track to build 500K cars in 2019 year. 370K is way off from that number.

<comment><USER15> So he violated his agreement with the SEC again? Specifically he didn't get his statement pre-approved by Tesla's lawyers to assure accuracy (since it is factually inaccurate).

In fact this exact type of tweet is listed by expressly in the updated agreement[0].

[0] [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/26/business/elon-musk- tesla-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/26/business/elon-musk-tesla- sec.html)

<comment><USER16> If the SEC's new standard is to reprimand every CEO that makes a forecast the company ends up coming short on they're gonna get pretty busy pretty quick...

<comment><USER15> It isn't. It is a settlement agreement that Musk personally and Tesla agreed to in order to avoid additional fines and penalties from his previous misconduct.

<comment><USER17> There was a lot of drama when Musk made this tweet, and we don't know what sort of discussions or agreements have been made behind closed doors.

Musk hasn't made similar tweets since then, so it seems plausible that SEC did indeed give some sort of warning, or that the parties have had some sort of clarifying exchange regarding their agreement.

<comment><USER18> The SEC publicly sued over this tweet, and basically lost. All they got out of it was the new agreement that makes the previous agreement clearer. Not the sort of punishment they were asking for.

This is all a matter of public record, it was not handled behind closed doors.

<comment><USER17> Thanks for the info, I wasn't aware of the lawsuit and its conclusion. That definitely settles the initial point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's a great quarter for Tesla, but how much was driven by the end of the tax rebate in the US at the end of the year? It'll be interesting to see how Q1 2020 compares in terms of deliveries in the US. International growth may become a higher percentage of growth over the next year, if they break it out that way.

I'm also wondering if sometime in 2020 Tesla reduces the price of the vehicle to offset the previous tax incentive.

<comment><USER20> If I remember correctly, it was down to $1850 for Q4, from a high of $7500 when we bought ours.

We've been hearing this "what about when the tax handouts go away" story for awhile, and it hasn't really panned out. Of course, Tesla has taken the edge off of that by strategically lowering prices, but now that it's down to $1850 (well, okay, $0 today) the benefit is marginal at best.

I actually had 3 friends ask me, unsolicited, for my referral code, in Q4 alone. 2 of those have been delivered, one hasn't ordered yet.

My only other referral was a year ago.

If anything, the increasing interest over time surprises me. I really did think they'd have a hard time sustaining sales once the initial backlog cleared out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The main thing I actually care about:

How on-track are they with deliveries for Model 3, especially outside of the US? Do you still have to wait 2 years to get a car?

Are they delivering the base model? Not the super expensive 60k EUR model, but something closer to the 35k USD.

<comment><USER22> In the US you can get a $40k model from stock right now.

Their website claims "$6,300 potential incentives and gas savings" to argue it's really more like a $35k car. Whether you find that convincing is up to you.

<comment><USER23> How much does an electrician cost to install a 240V line and outlet to your garage? That probably eats a bit of the "potential savings" from their "TCO pricing"...

<comment><USER24> Looks like usually less than $1000 ([https://forums.tesla.com/forum/forums/wall-charger- installat...](https://forums.tesla.com/forum/forums/wall-charger-installation- cost)).

Plus you don't need 240v, you can charge slowly on 110 which could make sense depending on how much you drive.

Plus you can charge elsewhere.

But yes the incentive number is silly on their pricing page.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm interested to see what the used market for Model 3's will look like. We're close to hitting the point where a notable number of original owners might want to trade in.

Im guessing it will be an odd market, since parts and service might be difficult for secondary owners. And a fair amount of the Model 3 parts have had a less than stellar history for durability.

<comment><USER20> Why would parts and service be more difficult for 2nd hand owners vs original buyers? The model should be the same. Schedule in the app, take it to a service center.

If anything, I'd wonder about warranty vs off-warranty. But don't they have even MORE of an incentive to service off-warranty vehicles which represent a revenue stream vs a cost?

<comment><USER25> Tesla seems to have a bad reputation for parts availability. I suspect they would prioritize new owners.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I wonder if the new factory in Germany will lower the costs for the European market. Currently it's pricey to fully own (not lease) a Tesla in Europe.

<comment><USER27> That assumes that an EU factory will find economies of scale and efficiencies to counter the higher real wages in EU compared to the US and China. And that Tesla won't simply add those efficiencies to their bottom line.

<comment><USER28> Are the wages in Germany really higher than in Fremont, CA (right outside one of the highest cost of living areas in the country)?

<comment><USER27> This article (1st Google hit) suggests they are:

[https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/car-news/98986/the-global- car-...](https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/car-news/98986/the-global-car- manufacturing-wage-gap-what-do-car-factory-workers-earn)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Stock is on a clear path.

Not too long ago Tesla was a risk, let's see how they operate with confidence.

I hope their semi will deliver.

ps: also battery technology and chemistry. Very important.

<comment><USER30> I just want actually affordable electric cars.

<comment><USER29> Think larger, climate change and all that

<comment><USER31> You don't think the cost of the car is at least partially a proxy for the amount of energy required to produce the components (primarily the battery)? Some pretty smart people have questioned whether, absent innovations in battery recycling, electric cars are actually green.

<comment><USER29> I don't know much about battery recycling but from the few I've read lithium batteries are above the 90% recycling mark (I've read 99%). Electric cars are far from totally green, but ICE are one order of magnitude more polluting (more parts, more lubricant, more cooling fluid, less lifespan).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Onward and upward!

</comment><comment><USER33> decent, but there must surely be a government grant that can improve those numbers?

<comment><USER34> Why? They're still in the luxury position where demand outweighs production and still need to scale up. That said they are getting government help in the form of tax breaks and stipends for consumers. Some of which are being toned down now (since this year) because a government's money isn't infinite either.

<comment><USER33> yeah, irony doesn't work well on the internet

my point is that his empire is largely ssupported by government grants etc, even though I do greatly admire his innovative approach and successes.</comment></comment></comment>