[ih] legal models [was: there must be a corollary to Godwin's law about Sec 230, was ARPANET pioneer]

[Bob Purvy]

One more anecdote and that's it, I promise:

Briefly, in 2010 or so, everyone thought that the "throw weight" of your
patent portfolio was all-important. Nortel's portfolio famously sold
<https://www.forbes.com/sites/elizabethwoyke/2011/07/07/an-insider-on-the-nortel-patent-auction-and-its-consequences/?sh=49e7ebdd59a3>
for $4.5 billion. Google bought Motorola for theirs 😂🙃

So we were interviewing lawyers who specialized in buying and selling
patents. I thought, "what's a good Googley question for someone like that?"

What I came up with was this:

* You have the opportunity to bid on 1,000 patents in the wireless space.
You have 24 hours to decide whether to bid, and how much. You can call on
any resources in Google to help you. What do you do?*

I gave this to 13 applicants, I think, and every answer was different.

One person, whom we hired for the Public Policy team in DC, said she'd get
a lot of people and read them all. I thought, "Well, that's not prohibited.
Not a bad answer."

Another reasonable answer was "$300,000 per patent."

There are also lots of ways to assess their value in an automated way, most
of them garbage.

On Mon, Mar 7, 2022 at 1:07 PM Bob Purvy <bpurvy at gmail.com> wrote:

> further anecdote:
>
> for years, I was the "engineer interviewer" for patent lawyer candidates
> at Google. I liked that much better than interviewing engineers. "After
> all, who *wouldn't* love torturing lawyers?" I would say.
>
> I'd describe a patent I had personal knowledge of (not a Google patent)
> and have them write claims for it. Kinda like a leetcode question for
> programmers.
>
> On Mon, Mar 7, 2022 at 12:35 PM Dr Eberhard W Lisse via Internet-history <
> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>
>> I have briefed the local Financial Crimes unit a number of years back.
>>
>> They were very clued up to ATM fraud but not at all to Internet Fraud.
>> But, they realized this quickly and were very concerned.
>>
>> Specialized unit officers do not get put there because they are
>> simpletons. And German CID officers all have a college degree
>> (undertaken as part of their training).
>>
>> el
>>
>>
>> On 2022-03-07 22:05 , Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history wrote:
>> > On 07-Mar-22 23:10, Dr Eberhard W Lisse via Internet-history wrote:
>> [...]
>> > I have to say that the fraud squad officers understood this very
>> > quickly, although it was completely new to them.
>> >
>> > Regards
>> >     Brian Carpenter
>> [...]
>>
>> --
>> Dr. Eberhard W. Lisse   \         /       Obstetrician & Gynaecologist
>> el at lisse.NA             / *      |  Telephone: +264 81 124 6733 (cell)
>> PO Box 8421 Bachbrecht  \      /  If this email is signed with GPG/PGP
>> 10007, Namibia           ;____/ Sect 20 of Act No. 4 of 2019 may apply
>> --
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>>
>