Former Google corporate attorney becomes Deputy Director of US Patent Office

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/12/michelle-lee/

by jonah • 13 years ago

91 25 13 years ago

lukifer• 13 years ago

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

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

iamshs• 13 years ago

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

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

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

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

ronaldx• 13 years ago

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

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

salient• 13 years ago

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

proksoup4• 13 years ago

Abolish intellectual property.

ori_b• 13 years ago

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

(Copyleft is based around intellectual property.)

smackmybishop• 13 years ago

Good luck in your endeavor!

NegativeK• 13 years ago

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

icebraining• 13 years ago

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

proksoup4• 13 years ago

That's a complete non-sequitur.

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

How does the ability to sue help open source?

davidw2• 13 years ago

Throw the baby out with the bathwater.

proksoup4• 13 years ago

What fucking baby?

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

cgs1019• 13 years ago

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

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

nostrademons• 13 years ago

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

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

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

jamesaguilar2• 13 years ago

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

womenintech• 13 years ago

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

2close4comfort2• 13 years ago

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

kcbanner• 13 years ago

This person formerly worked at Google, not currently.

2close4comfort2• 13 years ago

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

mathattack• 13 years ago

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

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

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

Former Google corporate attorney becomes Deputy Director of US Patent Office

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