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Ask Slashdot: Handling Patented IP In a Job Interview?
ZahrGnosis writes I'm in the midst of a rather lengthy job interview; something I haven't done for some time as I've worked as a contract employee with a much lower barrier to entry for years. Recently, I've started patenting some inventions that are applicable to my industry. One hope is that the patents look good to the prospective employer on a resume, but I don't want them to take the existing IP for granted as part of the deal. I'm worried I have the wrong attitude, however. My question is, how should I treat licensing of the patent as a topic with respect to the topic of my employment? Should I build the use of my patented ideas into my salary? Should I explicitly refuse to implement my patented IP for the company without a separate licensing fee? If I emphasize the patent during the interviews without the intent to give them the IP for free, is that an ethical lapse — a personal false advertising? At the same time, when I work for a company I feel they should get the benefit of my full expertise... am I holding back something I shouldn't by not granting a de-facto license while I work for them? I perceive a fine balance between being confrontational and helpful, while not wanting to jeopardize the job prospect nor restrict my ability to capitalize on my invention. Thoughts?
Yes, you should explicitly refuse to implement your patented IP for the company without a separate licensing fee. This is completely separate from employment.
In particular, you don't want to use your IP in their product without a licensing deal in place. That creates a conflict of interest situation, one likely to result in litigation later. What if, later, you sold your patent rights to another party and they sued your employer? Your employer could then sue you for putting them in that situation.
Bring in a lawyer. Welcome to the big time.
The real question is: are you applying for a job or are you trying to license your technology? In all likelihood, a blended negotiation is probably not going to happen unless: 1. you're looking for work in academics/advanced research or 2. you're a pre-eminent engineer/scientist being hired for your contributions in your inventive space.
If you're applying for a job, then the recruiter probably doesn't want to hear your invention pitch. The recruiter probably doesn't care about your patented stuff other than perhaps an aggregate count: e.g., I'm a named inventor on 3 million patent applications. You should be focused on what your qualifications for a job are.
If you're afraid that once you get the job that you're going to be deprived of a subsequent royalty stream, you should review your employment contract and should just flag that as a concern of yours. I suspect you're unlikely to get much value for your IPs from your employer, but at least the paperwork will be clear as to rights to use, the existence of the inventions prior to employment, etc.
If you're talking about trying to license your technology, then you need to talk to the right people. Probably their patent attorney or the person in charge of in-licensing technology. This is usually a protracted negotiation.
Last point, on your moral quandary: your patent probably doesn't stop you from deploying your full efforts at a job. It might stop you from implementing your own patented invention. But, on that point, you're the gatekeeper of your own invention. If you elect to deploy your patented invention as part of your regular work, you shouldn't expect compensation for it unless your employer asks you to.
I almost put a note in the original question about that, but I decided not to, in an effort to keep the talk on topic. So let me point out my stance. First, I'm against software patents and frankly I think the whole patent situation needs reform far beyond software patents. At the same time, if something is patentable, I'm not sure anyone should avoid patenting the idea simply because you disagree with the system. I'd rather patent them and donate the patents to the EFF and GPL an implementation. On the other hand, I want to avoid a situation where for-profit companies co-opt the idea and charge people for it. Maybe I'm not altruistic enough; I'm conflicted on it, honestly. I haven't quite gotten there yet, though, so in order to not turn this into a flame war I skipped the topic. Anyway, here we are, and I'm trying to respond thoughtfully rather than just, as you say, fuck off.
To answer you point, though, some of my ideas are similar to these patents... decide for yourself if these are deeply "software patents": https://www.google.com/patents/US6263334, https://www.google.com/patents/US20030187867, and https://www.google.com/patents/US7185023, and I'd love to get feedback on how to deal with that aspect of the issue.
No, I didn't patent those ideas, the links were examples; but I completely agree that the patent system is failing, and I pointed that out. The question is how to deal with it. I think it's a valid approach to continue to patent ideas until the issue is fixed because the mixed-bag approach is very difficult.
The EFF agrees at least that the situation is not black and white... from their site: "While [abandoning patents is] compelling, there are risks to this strong approach. Every piece of software released to the world without legal protections may leave open a door for someone else to attempt to patent the same technology (and may leave its creators more open to legal threats without a patent to wield defensively)." (https://www.eff.org/patent).
I am genuinely not trying to get rich (well, not through patent evil or trolling), or to be exploitative, and while I don't want to contribute to the problem, I don't want to be a victim of it. Anyway, I appreciate the comments, but again I was trying to shy the focus away from software patents... much ink has already been spilled on that topic. Assuming the patents were one that met your complete approval, would you feel differently?
I'm not sure how one might think patents on methods of optimizing database queries would not qualify as software patents. As someone else said below, it's applied mathematics. Heck, the "relational" part of "relational database" comes from the theory of set relations. And if databases are your field, you know that. And if you'd donated the patents to the EFF, then you wouldn't be asking this question.
Trying to play devil's advocate the only counterargument I can come up with is, "the optimizations are useful because of the way this particular computer is architected." But that's silly; much of number theory is useful and studied because it's applicable to cryptography. Being useful in an engineering situation doesn't turn mathematics into engineering.
I don't believe in telling people to fuck off for asking an honest question. At the same time, I'm not personally inclined to help you with your problem, because you're asking with help engaging in an antisocial activity. The weird thing is, from your comment, it seems we're in agreement on that, but you don't see that what you're doing is what we both believe is wrong. Dude, those kinds of patents are the types of things most software developers talk about when they mean software patents. Amazon one-click and Microsoft's FAT patent are just talked about more because *EVERYONE* runs into those, whereas only compiler developers run into the asinine register allocation patents, and only database developers run into yours. But they're still bad, just bad in a narrower field. Look up the history of register allocation in GCC and LLVM if you want to see what patents can do to OSS. LLVM uses linear scan register allocation, which is faster than the standard graph coloring algorithm, but worse-performing. Guess which consideration is most important in 2014 when you can compile on 16 CPUs at once? GCC, as usual, does something totally fucked up because it's been around so long accumulating cruft, but its algorithm was originally designed around exactly the same patents LLVM had to design around.
Again: software patents have crippled open source compilers' register allocation algorithms from the dawn of GCC to the rise of LLVM. How disgusting is that? And the register allocation patents are what happens when we're aware of the patents and they're held by an OSS-friendly company (IBM).
If you're not going to stop patenting software, but you care about the ethical implications of your work, my minimal request to you would be to donate the patents somewhere like the EFF or FSF in your will. If you don't, your heirs might decide to sell your work to SCOracle and you'll fuck up every OSS database for a LONG. TIME. I'm sure you don't want that to be your legacy.
And btw, if you haven't, you should have your estate planning done anyway. Everyone with even a small amount of assets should. Shit happens, it's not as expensive as you might think, and a competent attorney will also prepare "collaterals" where you say, among other things, what you want to happen if you end up like Terri Schiavo. And if you're not aware of why you really need to make that absolutely clear in a totally legally binding way ... just look at the Wikipedia article for "Terri Schiavo".
vi ~/.emacs # I'm probably going to Hell for this.
I've hired many employees who, either in their spare time or as part of previous employment, had a stable of patents. I hired them often because they had the patents, and as a technology company we never assumed the patents came for free. Incidentally not once did we license those patents.
Verbing wierds language.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.