Comment by frob | Hacker News Reader

Comment by frob | Hacker News Reader

When I was at one of the FAANGs, the corporate legal people wanted to make a patent for a recommendation system I was the tech lead on. They called me into a room with two patent layers for a disclosure meeting. In general, I have an issue with software parents, but I definitely didn't believe our work was patentable since everything seemed like an obvious extension of standard practices to me (think agents reaponding to events).

I then proceeded to spend the next hour telling the lawyers that there is nothing novel in our system, that all of the connections and features would be obvious and intuitive to anyone familiar with the trade of software engineering, that all technologies in the system are common practices, and just in general refusing to let them reframe it in legalese to make it sound like something it wasn't. I could tell they were getting frustrated by the end, but it was one of the best hours I have ever spent. I'm proud I didn't let a megacorp patent standard software practices.

Did they lead with "we award $x for each patent"?

I should say - 'did they forget to lead with'

Spoiler alert: they patented it anyway [1] after he left [2]

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=j_1lIFRdnhA

[2] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O95fnszzI6I

I check for it every few months. If they do publish it, I plan on filing a challenge with the PTO. It has now been long enough that I don't think it will be published.

This is about "obviousness" (103). That's next week's post.

So, put it another way, you, a person with an axe to grind, decided to be completely unhelpful, because of the axe you have to grind? Inventiveness is a legal concept in the patent world, not exactly coextensive with whatever you seem to think the concept means in your head.

It sounds like they called him in to give his opinion and he did that. I don't see how that is unhelpful. An employee's job is not to ensure that the employer gets its way no matter what.

Not saying it is, but he just sounds like a pain in the ass, not like someone that actually had a point.

My point was that everything they were they were trying to patent was an obvious trick of the trade. They were trying to patent thing along the lines of: generate->filter->rank. It's how basically any recommendation engine works and has been described in numerous existing patents.

But I tried not to be a jerk at all. Every time they asked me about a different aspect of the system, I could just say something like, "We used standard software engineering techniques using an algorithm built in to [common language] to sort things here. It's a fairly common approach to this sort of problem." After a statement like that, the patent lawyers had very little to pull on. They'd move on to another aspect and I'd give a similar answer.

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