I have friends who have gone through this experience. I was pretty surprised too that the company was willing to pay so much to defend their patents. Granted... my friend's rate was fairly reasonable... I think between $500-$1000/hour in probably the early 2000s.
It really depends on the patent in the end of the day. If a company can potentially lose tens or hundreds of millions over a lost lawsuit, spending a million on legal defense would be very reasonable.
I have not talked to my employer about this. I wanted to get some collective wisdom from the HN community before approaching them. But yeah, I'll definitely give it a shot. It doesn't hurt to ask.
I can see where you are coming from, and I wouldn't be surprised if the same argument is used by the company. If that is the case. O well, I wish them well but I would never be this naive again.
There is just one point that you might have missed.
The patent work doesn't stop the moment you finish filing. In fact, almost all valuable patents will be challenged in court, which can cost a LOT of money. In those cases, the company would have to hire back the original inventors to defend them in court, for which the original inventors can charge almost an arbitrary amount of money for.
In my personal opinion, it would not be wise for the company to argue over pocket change amount of money if it risks destroying the relationship between the company and the inventor. If that is really the case, when the day comes that the company needs help, the inventor would not hesitate to charge exorbitant fee just to spite the company. I honestly believe this is why @smoyer in the other comment is still getting paid by his company even though he is no longer employed.
Last but not least, on a human level, I feel it is a bit unfair given how much extra I worked for these patents, above and beyond my call of duty. I'm not going to cry over it but it will leave me in a pretty bad mood. If I end up getting screwed over, well... let my experience serve as a lesson for rest of the aspiring inventors in similar situation in the future.
Good point! I'll check to see if any of my friends can get me a copy of the patent policy.
I wonder how legal it is in the state of California to bar the people from getting their reward simply because they are no longer with the company. Patent approval has nothing to do with the employment status. This seems a bit unfair to be honest.
Further, they specifically asked me for help AFTER I left the company. I agreed to help as a good-will gesture. I wish I could've clarified the reward policy back then.
This might be a silly question, but why was there a fork in the first place? The article wasn't as clear on explaining that part. Can someone else elaborate on that part?
World Startup Report team here. There have been many repeated questions in this thread, so we compiled all them into a single long answer for everyone.
At World Startup Report, our goal was to show the world how big of an internet company you can build in each country. We have partnered with Startup Genome, as well as worked closely with Startup Digest and Hackers/Founders network to collect all this data.
As we proceeded, we lowered our goal of covering 100 countries to covering 50 since we aimed to find the most reliable (as well as interesting) data. Our methodology included looking at publicly available data (stock market), online publications from sources like Financial Times, TechCrunch, The Next Web, etc. or sometimes even personal conversations with those companies. The definition of internet companies was: no ISPs, no software development houses (unless they have online products they are selling), no hardware companies. If a company is diversified (as was usually the case) we looked at the revenue breakdown and searched for the highest internet-related revenue streams.
However, we do accept the fact that this information is constantly changing (we had to replace a few companies due to various reasons (even bankruptcy) over the course of our month-long research). At the same time, we are aware that there could have been a few omissions and this is the price we are willing to pay to show the public the best available data there is on the web right now.
One last thing, we've put up our raw data on Silk, so you could play around with it as it is easier to visualize it.
The country location for a company in this research was determined by where the bulk of the employees are currently. The intent of this definition is to show which countries are most capable of building big internet companies, not where the founders are coming from.
Yahoo!Japan is actually an independent company from Yahoo. It is roughly 30% owned by Softbank and 30% owned by Yahoo. It is listed as it is the top 3 internet company in Japan.
Yahoo is not listed, because it is not the top 3 company in the US.
As mentioned in another thread, The World Startup Report team aimed for 100 countries for this research, but realistically we were able to only get good data for 50 countries for this research.
If your country is not on the list, and you would like to join us for the next World Startup Report research as a representative for your country, please email us: [email protected]
We'd love for your help to participate in this community research!
The World Startup Report team aimed for 100 countries for this research, but we settled for 50 as we didn't have enough local support from the smaller countries.
If your country is not on the list, and you would like to join us for the next World Startup Report research as a representative for your country, please email us: [email protected]
We'd love for your help to participate in this community research!
Please note, we stopped updating this list since January 2014 because the list got too long. If anyone wants to lead this community effort moving forward, we'd love to speak to you!
However, this might be changing too...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-stopchat-censors-can-now...