HACKER Q&A
📣 athrowaway1

Is it a coincidence someone patented my MVP?


Throwaway. I publicly posted my MVP on a tech forum, and a few days later a tech company filed a patent for the same thing. I'm assuming it's a coincidence, and that we were both working on the same thing at the same time. Had anyone experienced this before? And is it feasible someone could pull together and submit a patent in less than a week?


  👤 simonblack Accepted Answer ✓
Coincidence.

It happens all the time. Even with things that seemingly arrive 'out of the blue'.

Both the Germans and British invented jet engines within months of each other. They also both invented radar at around the same time.

I have invented things that were later patented by others, too. This was my most important, I invented it about 10 years before it was patented, but (stupidly) did nothing with it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjTa3SeKuaE

Millions of people have the same background knowledge that you do. Any one of them could have done the same as you. The thing about one-in-a-million chances is that when you have ten million opportunities you will very likely get ten hits.


👤 forgotmypw17
Probably a coincidence, in my opinion. How long ago did it happen?

When did you actually see that it was filed? If you saw it come out of the patent office a few days later, it was probably filed much earlier than your forum post.

If you saw it later but it was filed several days after your post, I think it is feasible, perhaps with the aid of someone like GPT-3, to put together a patent application that quickly.


👤 itronitron
If the tech company had filed other (related or not) patents previously then it is feasible that they authored and submitted the patent in less than a week.

They may also have been working on the same thing at the same time as you, and then needed to accelerate their patent application after your MVP posting.

The only thing that really matters is the claims section of the patent, so if you can access those be sure to read them to determine how much it overlaps with your stuff.


👤 phendrenad2
Software patents are a disaster. If you see someone make something, you can just patent it and steal it from them, because you can afford a patent and they can't.

👤 athrowaway1
Update for your interest I'm meeting a patent attorney and if there are any valuable findings or lessons learned I'll share them here.(EDIT disclaimer purely for interest - not as actionable legal advice for anyone to use!)

👤 iordachej
Where did you look for finding that your idea was already patented ?

👤 imtu80
I'm not an attorney or don't know much about patents but if you prove your idea/product existed before the patent was filed doesn't it protect you?