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JoshuaFox comments on Post ridiculous munchkin ideas! - LessWrong
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I learned how to crank out patents. My thinking, over the years, shifted from "Wow, I can really be an inventor," to "Wow, I can Munchkin a ridiculously misconfigured system" and beyond that to "This is really awful."
My blog post: "The evil engineer's guide to patents".
Since Munchkining means following the letter of the rules, while bypassing the unspoken rules, we should consider how often it is accompanied by moral dissonance.
Getting a patent through is far from cheap. While the filing fee is not much, the rest is prohibitively expensive if it's not paid for by your employer, about $10k or so per simple patent, all told. Probably not worth it for a line on your resume in most cases. I wonder if there is a way to munchkin this cost.
The article is aimed mostly at salaried employees, and so the cost is not relevant, so long as the employer wants to pay it, which they generally do.
There sure is. As described in the blog:
(I did the provisional patent thing myself once.)
At worse, even if you abandon it because of cost, no problem: As mentioned in the blog post
I meant getting the actual patent, even if you are not successful at funding it.
Not that I know of. But why would you care about getting an issued patent (particularly in software) if you do not want to be a patent troll?
Considering this from the perspective of how an employer would see my CV, take a look at my list of patents.
Can you even tell the difference: Which are (1) under review at the USPTO; (2) abandoned by a bankrupt startup (two or three, but there is no public record of that, so even I don't officially know); (3) rejected (none, that almost never happens); (4) issued and approved as patents?
But I will grant that listing the $100 provisional patent application in your CV as a "patent application" is beyond the bounds of good taste. I do not list my (long-gone) provisional patent anywhere.
Thus, patents in your resume do provide a real signal (though weaker than many people think): They show that someone (an employer) thought it was worth investing some money in filing it.
Darn it. I was just about to suggest "be a patent troll" as a Munchkin-y thing to do.
Apparently, it's really, really easy to get patents accepted, even on things that are very broad, that have been done before, are blindingly obvious, or are even things you don't actually know how to make! The way things stand, you could probably get a patent for a Star Trek style teleporter with a few block diagrams and some fancy-sounding bullshit, and I'm dead serious about that. You know what one guy managed to patent? "Machine vision" - connecting a camera, any camera, to a computer. He first applied for the patent in 1954, but years later enforced variations of it against people who used bar code scanners. You can't make a submarine patent any more, so patenting a Star Trek teleporter probably won't make you any money, but people have indeed made money patenting things that were impractical when they were patented. For example, someone patented remote online backup services, then someone else bought the patent and started suing people trying to offer those services.
In general, because defending a lawsuit in the U.S. is expensive, there are people who manage to make quite a bit of money by threatening to sue people on shaky grounds and offering to settle for less than the cost to defend the case. (Many other countries discourage this kind of extortion by forcing a losing plaintiff to pay the defendant's court costs, but that has a chilling effect on valid lawsuits as well as bogus ones.)
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