Academia and free software programmers need protection from patent vultures
I got a similar Google experience - I have helped them for 3.5 years through their public forum in their video compression adaptation of my ANS coding, hoping for a formal collaboration with my University.
Instead, it has turned out impossible as, meanwhile, they have secretly filed a patent on my suggestions - without contacting me or disclosing communication of the actual inventor.
There are these two worlds: patent industry wanting ownership on every ideas - mainly fueled by lawyers.
From the other side there is academia, free software programmers - people who actually make the development, and usually just want its unrestricted use - but now we are terrified by these patent vultures wanting to forbid everybody using our work, who are extremely difficult to defend from due to having much more resources and being protected by the system - e.g. that there are no legal consequences even for well documented plagiarism.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
