Google Wants Patent On Splitting Restaurant Bills 196
theodp writes "In a classic example of parody coming to life," writes GeekWire's Todd Bishop, "a newly published patent filing reveals Google's ambitions to solve one of the most troublesome challenges known to humanity: Splitting the bill at the end of a meal." In its patent application for Tracking and Managing Group Expenditures, Google boasts that the invention of six Googlers addresses 'a need in the art for an efficient way to track group expenditures and settle balances between group members' by providing technology that thwarts 'group members [who] may not pay back their entire share of the bill or may forget and not pay back their share at all.'
"Innovation" (Score:5, Interesting)
These kind of bullshit patents spring up when a company incentivizes it's employees to generate as much IP as possible during their day to day development, so as to mine the path for any other company trying to reimplement the technology and follow the same (obvious and non-innovative) path.
I don't know how Google does it, but my company offers a 2000$ monetary bonus for each submission that reaches the filling stage, the vast majority of which are accepted by the patent office. That's right, anything from inventing public key crypto to splitting the bill is patented and squirreled away in the defensive portfolio. The innovatory aspect does not even matter any more, it's all about quantity, they set up all sort of "innovation targets" that entail reaching a certain number of patents. A patent per year is required for any senior wanting to get a good year-end rating.
This is the most anti-competitive, anti-science and anti-progress way to do R&D that I can imagine.
Re:Imagine this: (Score:3, Interesting)
Sadly I don't have to imagine. I've been through that process (at Google). Nobody is blind. Everyone knows the entire thing is bullshit. I really feel for the patent lawyers who end up doing this stuff all day.
These sorts of patents result from pressure from management to generate patents. Simple as that. They argue, of course, that it is for defensive purposes, and there is surely some merit to that. Google is unlikely to get bought or liquidated anytime soon. And whilst current management is in place they're unlikely to turn into patent trolls either. But Larry and Sergey won't be at the reigns forever. That's why I never liked taking part in it, even though my name ended up on a few patents along the way (for things only slightly less obvious than splitting a restaurant bill).
The sad thing is I know of one guy who developed something that actually was quite innovative, no other competitor has something like that AFAIK, and they chose not to patent because it was deemed better off as a trade secret. That's the patent system in action folks!
PayPal already did it (Score:3, Interesting)
This is in fact how PayPal came to be. These four guys would go out to eat often, and when it came time to pay, one guy would cover the meal, and the other three would reimburse him by whipping out their PDAs and transferring the funds to his bank account. They quickly realized that this concept of quickly and easily transferring money electronically was the wave of the future, formed a company called Confinity, and launched this product called PayPal a year later. Within only a few months, Confinity was bought out by some guy named Elon Musk.
I just wish Google would buy out PayPal and have it all under one damn roof. Plus, how cool would it be if Google made space ships? :D
Re:Fine Print (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:"Innovation" (Score:3, Interesting)
We have the same thing here (fortune 100 company); approximately same bonus too.
The big problem is of course that if we didn't do this our competitors, who all do the same thing, would haul our asses into court on every contract we tried to sign or product we tried to launch (not that they don't already, but it's generally kept at a low level / settled beforehand since both parties know that the other also has hundreds of patents that an unknowledgeable jury or arbiter _might_ find infringing)..
Re:"Innovation" (Score:5, Interesting)
Exactly the same I.P. policies at my place of employment. We also split that 2K if more than one person works on it. This causes people to hide their ideas (& other's) & develop then in secret. Then file their invention disclosures on the sly. This causes a lot of animosity & accusations of idea theft.
Very little real innovation has happened in years under this policy. A whole lotta crap though!
This is not the problem (Score:4, Interesting)
The actual problem are the passive-aggressive douchebags who make it a contest to see who gets to pay for everyone's meal, and later whine about how some people never pay for everyone's meal, so that they can be both the altruistic Christian hero and the exploited supply-sider hero.
Re:"Innovation" (Score:4, Interesting)
This is the most anti-competitive, anti-science and anti-progress way to do R&D that I can imagine.
That's because it has nothing to do with R&D. Fairly few patents generated by engineers in tech companies even have anything at all to do with their day to day work, and aren't things that they actually build.
Incentives like the ones you mention (and, yes, Google does the same thing, except IIRC the bonus amounts are higher) do accomplish exactly what they're intended to accomplish: to build up a massive quantity of low-quality patents as inexpensively as possible. This is because the companies incenting this patent mania don't actually intend to use the inventions in any products, or really to use them directly at all. The goal is merely to build up a warchest of patents to increase the odds that if the company is sued for patent infringement that it can find something in its warchest with which to countersue.
In a nutshell: These patent incentives are about building legal capabilities, not technical capabilities.
For much of its existence, Google eschewed this patent arms race because it (rightly) viewed it as irrelevant or even harmful to actual progress. But the reality of the system in which we live eventually caught up with Google, and after finding itself at the mercy of other companies who did play the game, Google realized that it also has to play. Google bought Motorola to acquire a pre-packaged patent warchest, and also began incenting its engineers to produce patents.
Not many Google engineers do, actually, because outside of the bonuses there's little or no internal incentive to do it. Getting a bunch of patents that everyone knows are silly and useless won't get you promoted, or even a raise, and it won't increase your peers' estimation of you (which is why it won't get you promoted; promotions are based almost entirely on peer review). Nor will it lower your peers' opinions of you. It's just irrelevant, except for the extra cash.
IMO, this is exactly the right response by Google's management. The reality is that Google must have and continue accumulating a patent warchest, because that's how the world works. Google is also lobbying for patent reform, but that's a slow and uncertain prospect. But it's also true that while being able to survive legal battles is critically important to a tech company's survival, a company's success comes from its technology, so it would be a bad idea for Google to build a culture that actually glorifies patents. So, promotions and status are based on impact, but Google engineers who want to can earn a little extra cash by coming up with patentable ideas.
It's not ideal, but within the context of the litigious world we inhabit it's the best approach.
Re:Imagine this: (Score:4, Interesting)
Any yes, one year for software is long enough.
Re:"Innovation" (Score:4, Interesting)