Three engineers at Google recently came up with a futuristic way to help people who are stumbling during a video call presentation. They propose that when an algorithm detects a speaker's increased pulse rate or change in the length of their “hmmm”, a generative AI bot that mimics that voice could simply take over.
Its cutting-edge ideas were not published at large corporate events or in academic journals. Instead, this article was published in his 1,500-word post on a little-known free website called TDCommons.org, which Google secretly owned and funded for his nine years. I did. Google had never talked to the media about its website until last year when WIRED received a link to the idea on TDCommons and became interested.
Scroll through TDCommons to read Google's latest ideas for tweaking smart home gadgets to improve your sleep, protecting the privacy of your mobile search results, and using AI to summarize your personal activity from your photo archives can. And Google isn't the only one submitted. About 150 organizations, including HP, Cisco, and Visa, also have their inventions listed on his website.
This website is home to ideas that seem potentially valuable, but not worth spending tens of thousands of dollars to patent. By disclosing technical details and establishing “prior art,” Google and other companies can prevent other companies from filing patents on similar concepts and avoid future disputes. Google gives its employees a $1,000 bonus for each invention they post on TDCommons, which is one-tenth of the amount given to patent applicants. Employees also get a ready-to-share link to gloat about their secret work.
TDCommons is part of Google's longstanding and more vocal push to carve out more space for unfettered innovation in an industry where patents are used to hobble competitors or squeeze cash from them. This is in addition to our efforts. This site may be vulgar and confusing, but it's effective. “The beauty of Defense Publications is that this her website is very simple,” said Laura Sheridan, head of patent policy at Google. She said, “We need to set a date. And we need access to the documents. There's nothing more we need to do.”
In practice, this experiment has struggled to break through government bureaucracy and compete with more robust archives. Sheridan acknowledges this is a work in progress. For TDCommons to become less idiosyncratic and more significant, it needs larger upload flows. This offers the unique hope of expanding public access to the technological creativity happening within corporate walls and directing more resources to that work.
play defense
The strategy behind TDCommons dates back several decades to the 1950s, when invention powerhouses IBM and later Xerox began publishing journals filled with what they called technology disclosures. He then sent the journal to the patent office, which also served as prior art, and claimed rights to the ideas it contained. Approximately 84% of patent applications rejected by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in the 12 months ending September 2023 were invalidated, at least in part, by prior art, the agency said.
During the Internet boom of the early 2000s, entrepreneurs saw an opportunity to incorporate these defensive publications (dpubs) into online databases. IP.com is widely considered a leader, with 215,000 inventions uploaded to date and searchable access to millions of additional documents from outlets such as the open access research library arXiv.org . Unlike TDCommons, posting to or accessing IP.com is not free. dpub uploads cost $395 for up to 25 pages, while viewers pay $40 for individual downloads and $49 per month for unlimited access. The USPTO is one of IP.com's largest customers, with most of the agency's 9,200 examiners and supervisors under contract, the company said.