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letsdothis3 ago

The dingo... er, Google stole my patent! Biz boss tells how Choc Factory staff tried to rip off idea from interview

Jie Qi, cofounder of edu-tech electronics biz Chibitronics, marked the launch of patent education site PatentPandas.org with her account of how Google tried to patent her research after inviting her to meet with company executives.

In March 2014, Qi says, she was working on her doctorate at MIT's Media Lab, developing techniques for integrating electronic circuits into paper books. She received an invitation to visit Google's Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) group, which was headed at the time by Regina Dugan.

..Google then proceeded to file a US patent application related to her work, a fact she didn't realize until 2016. That's when a friend involved in paper engineering mentioned that some of the individuals who had met her at Google had filed a patent application on interactive pop-up booked embedded with circuitry.

"These patents covered many of the same things that [I] had discussed, that I’d showed them, with no mention of my or others’ work in the field," wrote Qi in her post. "I found out from a friend who followed a pop-up book blog – someone there was excited that Google was researching book technologies and happened to publish a blog post about it."

This was three weeks after she learned that the backer of a crowdfunding campaign to develop LED stickers filed to patent that idea without the involvement of Qi or her colleagues.

After Qi involved MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito, Google offered to add Qi as an inventor of the patent. She declined, she says, because others who had worked on the project would not be included.

Patent Pandas website: https://patentpandas.org/