Does anyone know how do companies incentivize employees to come up with such patents? Does the patenting initiative come from the employee that "invents" or is this decision made by someone else?
I was sort of darkly amused by the messaging eBay sends out to solicit patent ideas from employees. One of the primary themes is "don't worry if it's obvious; obvious ideas are still patentable".
Well, money is money and capitalism is capitalism. I have a pretty big internal debate about the morality of our patent system, but probably wouldn't bat an eye about proposing/provisioning/filing one for a nice bonus.
It's not just "skilled in the art", someone of "ordinary skill in the art".
And with all the complaints you inevitably read whenever an interviewing thread happens about candidates unable to code up FizzBuzz, you can guess what the level of "ordinary skill" in our industry is...
>there was always pressure from management to file patents //
IBM's past technical disclosure bulletins (TDB) [I think they stopped them a while back] suggest that there wasn't "always" pressure just that they realise[d] that their patent portfolio is one of their greatest assets - strongly encouraging employees to flag apparent innovations (and getting upstream oversight of those innovations) means that IBM can make the most of the inventiveness of their employees though.
The public benefit is early disclosure of every possible innovation and the TDB helped to disseminate details of tech that may not have been well known.
I could see how that would encourage every employee to try to churn as many "inventions" as possible, especially since patent deals are usually made in bulk, and not over specific patents. So even if the patent is crappy, there's a chance you can get a big payout.
Yes and no. Patents are often licensed or traded in bulk, but only a foolish entity would pay anything for a patent they have not read. However, patents are typically traded as part of a portfolio, and often the portfolio is structured so that it has a few really good ones and a bunch of nuisance or filler patents. Ideally you don't want to pay for those at all, but the seller won't sell anything other than the whole portfolio. Say they offer it for some amount X. So essentially you have to go back and say, "look, these 3 are OK but the rest are really narrow/useless/invalid/crappy, so we think your portfolio is worth much less than X." And negotiation happens.
I can't say how the bonuses are handed out once a portfolio is sold. Ideally, you'd guess the inventors of the "better" patents would get bigger bonuses. The most likely scenario, unfortunately, is that the inventors get nothing, and very likely are not even aware. It's a shame inventors are so unaware of the value companies reap from their IP.
I haven't worked at companies who think along these lines, but friends of mine in the private sector have received bonuses similar to those they'd get for excellent annual performance: a stock grant or cash bonus ($3-5k, although I'm sure it varies).
I worked briefly at Orange Labs (R&D branch of France Telecoms) - they showed off how many patents they'd had approved and gave employees a bonus (~£1000 I think) if they published a patent.
Some people are actually proud of their patents, even in CS area. I was pretty surprised about it, but someone I know was really happy that they got their 13th patent granted.
I am proud of some of my patents. The inventions behind them are works of art just like what an open-source contribution may be. These are not inventions that everyone or anyone could come up with. At least in one remarkable case, many people were working on the problem at hand but could not figure even how to start.
To summarize, do not confuse bad cases from good cases. You cannot have a blanket statement of the type, "some people are proud of their open-source contributions ... I was surprised about it".
Yes I can, this is my statement. At least for the CS related people. I'm not confusing good and bad cases, I disagree with the abstract ideas patents (any programs included) completely and other patents to some extent. Basically I disagree with the current state where if I came up with the same idea you did and patented, I owe you something. Both because I don't and because it's not feasible to actually check all granted patents before you do anything.
What is flawed is the state of the affairs in the patent mechanism, not the premise of the patents in principle. I am against the issues resulting from frivolous patents too. Unfortunately, in my opinion, most people against patents do not reason about their philosophy making it harder to convince the authorities against patents.
My understanding is that before patents, people and companies would invent but keep their invention a trade secret for as long as they can, which meant they had exclusivity to the invention. Patents allow such exclusivity for a limited period of time in exchange of disclosing the invention and losing rights over it after a specified period.
The patents applicability criterion correspondingly includes non-obviousness which is to judge if someone else could come up with the same invention without investing significant time and effort or not. Majority of the ideas are "supposed to be" ruled out by this criterion.
The state of the affairs however is that most obvious of the things get patented because (1) obviousness is unmeasurable, and (2) searching the prior art fully is impractical.
Short message: You cannot call all swans white simply because most you see are white.
That is actually the case for most people outside the HN / open-source bubble. When you read a media outlet or the EFF make flat broad statements that "engineers hate software patents", you now know that they are, at best, pandering, or at worst simply lying.
The truth is, the vast majority of software engineers don't even know what a patent is. Of the rest, some are neutral, some are pro-, and some are anti-software patent. Of course, you only ever hear from the latter group because they think it's a big problem, and the rest really don't see anything wrong.
Similar to what WorldWideWayne is saying, it's possible to be anti-patent and still have some sense of pride over being granted one. The two are far from mutually exclusive. I'm strongly opposed to software patents but would still be giddy if I got one for some neat search algorithm.
I suggest reading about collective action, tragedy of the commons, and prisoners' dilemma. Acting alone and then convincing others to join you will make a difference, but we need to stop thinking about ourselves and start thinking about the society and future we would want to live in if we were suddenly dropped in with no assets or contacts.
I'm quite familiar with all of them, and I completely agree. I'm simply pointing out that there's a divide between the things that make us happy on a conscious level and a visceral level. I'd liken getting a patent to eating the last piece of pizza. I know it's bad for me, and I know I've deprived others of the experience so I should _feel_ bad, but it was also tasty so I can't help but feel somewhat satisfied.
I see something wrong with "the system" but I'd still file a patent for the monetary bonus and the prestige that you get in many circles. My individual action here isn't going to change the system either way.
Same reason that I don't vote. I think a lot of people fall into this category of thinking.
But ask yourself, why do you feel something is wrong with the system? My guess is because you've only been exposed to the media outrage built around cherrypicked examples of bad patents. I've read hundreds of patents, most of which could be called "software patents", and the reality is much more mundane and boring: the vast majority of patents are not groundbreaking or even interesting, but they are not overly broad or vague or obvious either, and very rarely are they infringed by anybody because they solve a narrow problem that nobody else has.
I talked to a Microsoft guy who has a patent in his name, but was now kind of embarrassed about it. He said that he didn't have much leeway when he first started there. So in this case the decision came from his superiors.
