Who 'Owns' the Google Driverless Car IP?

theodp writes "Google co-founder Sergey Brin recently revealed that he is now leading Google's efforts to ready a driverless car for the consumer market, but one big, publicly-unanswered question is: Who exactly owns the intellectual property behind the highly-touted vehicles? To develop the Google Car, the company said it tapped 'the very best engineers from the DARPA Challenges,' a series of autonomous vehicle races organized by the U.S. government which provided university teams with millions in development funding and millions more in prizes. Last year, Carnegie Mellon reported that 8 of the 15-member Google Car team had current or past ties to DARPA Challenge participants CMU and Stanford. Whether Google's sponsorship of the Stanford Racing Team and CMU Tartan Racing entitled it to the IP is unclear. Clouding matters further is that key Google Car Team members are listed as inventors of autonomous car technology in pending patents assigned to the likes of General Motors and Toyota, and it was reported that the credit (and liability) for another key team member's successful robotic, autonomous Prius project was his-and-his-alone, not Google's. Could another party lay claims to the technology, or does Google have all of its IP ducks in a row on this one?"

Comments

Re:I swear this sounds like bait for a trap

[goombah99]

It is almost like Google designed this car to be the epitome of the worst patent law could do. That it has ties to every company possible. I mean, what next? Google throws in a built in iPod to drag apple in?

Google has run roughshod over everyone else's IP. Some of it may be legit but it is a consistent pattern. For example, who would deny that YouTube is built off of loads of clips from copyrighted materials? google profits from this immensely even if they did not upload the copyrighted material themselves.

Google news completely rips off and sublinks to copyrighted news content without compensation or even requesting permission.

Their android runs afoul of Microsoft and Apple IP. Don't take my word for it: manufacturers and courts have voted with their pocket books and injunctions. Google profits enormously from adoption of android since it enhances user adoption of the google ecosystem.

You can quibble but the pattern here is clear; take first and apologize later. make all assumptions about IP in the most favorable light for google profit.

As a consumer I of course benefit from all this. But producers of content are getting hurt.