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The Patent Bubble... Still Growing
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| The brainchild of former Microsoft CTO, Nathan Myrhvold, Intellectual
| Ventures has reportedly amassed $5 billion in capital and a portfolio of over
| 20,000 acquired patents -- and it's looking for more. From the perspective of
| the tech sector, Intellectual Ventures combines two questionable business
| models, the patent troll and the pyramid scheme, in a form that evokes Wall
| St.'s cleverness in designing glitzy vehicles for esoteric assets.
|
| IV does not create or market products, so it is invulnerable to the patents
| of others. It looks like a patent troll, because it makes money from "being
| infringed." But IV has a new twist: The companies that settle not only pay
| license fees but are induced to invest in IV, thereby providing the capital
| to acquire more patents, set up new licensing funds, and pursue other
| companies.
|
| [...]
|
| There you have it: Arbitrage in exotic assets. A system that values legal
| instruments over real products. And a context-dependent and uncertain value
| for the legal instrument itself. No better than mortgage-backed derivatives.
| And maybe a lot worse.
`----
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brian-kahin/the-patent-bubble-still-g_b_129232.html
Intellectual property bill passes in the House
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| The bipartisan legislation passed in the House 341-41, with dissenters on
| both sides of the aisle. The measure has received wide support from the
| business community, including from groups like the Recording Industry
| Association of America and the AFL-CIO, but it is opposed by public interest
| groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge.
`----
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10053294-38.html
...must have been an expensive law to buy.
Recent:
Nathan Myhrvold’s Patent Extortion Fund Is Reaping Hundreds Of Millions of
Dollars
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| Don’t blame Nathan Myhrvold for taking advantage of the culture of rampant
| patent litigation in this country. He is only doing what large companies with
| vast patent portfolios such as IBM and Microsoft do on a daily basis: use the
| threat of patent infringement litigation to strike lucrative patent licensing
| deals. Except Myhrvold, who used to be Bill Gates’ right-hand man at
| Microsoft during the 1990s, does it through his patent-gobbling fund,
| Intellectual Ventures.
`----
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/09/17/nathan-myhrvolds-patent-extortion-fund-is-reaping-hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars/
Invention Capitalism & the Law: Checking in on Nathan Myhrvold
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| Myhrvold told the WSJ that he acknowledges facing resistance from companies
| he targets for licenses. But his patent inventory gives him leverage to
| extract settlements without litigation. “I say, ‘I can’t afford to sue you on
| all of these, and you can’t afford to defend on all these,’” he said.
`----
http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2008/09/17/invention-capitalism-the-law-checking-in-on-nathan-myhrvold/
Nathan Myhrvold: Alpha patent troll?
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| Former Microsoft exec Nathan Myhrvold has been collecting patents, extracting
| fees from technology companies via his company Intellectual Ventures. Is
| Myhrvold a patent troll with tech cred?
|
| The Wall Street Journal has a long account of Myhrvold’s patent collecting
| efforts and how he is winning multimillion dollar payments from the likes of
| Verizon and Cisco. These payments are top secret material, but Myhrvold’s
| firm is the one reaping the rewards. Intellectual Ventures has more than
| 20,000 patents. In many respects, Myhrvold is just a patent trader. A few
| lawsuits could define him as a troll quickly though.
`----
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=10069
Tech Guru Riles the Industry
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| Over the past few years, the former Microsoft Corp. executive has quietly
| amassed a trove of 20,000-plus patents and patent applications related to
| everything from lasers to computer chips. He now ranks among the world's
| largest patent-holders -- and is using that clout to press tech giants to
| sign some of the costliest patent-licensing deals ever negotiated.
`----
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122161127802345821.html
Patent startup gains high profile backing
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| John Amster, one of two former Intellectual Ventures executives that formed
| RPX, said he will not detail the company's business model or customers until
| October. However he did say RPX will acquire patents in a broad range of
| technology and e-commerce areas, especially when the patents are being
| asserted or involved in litigation.
`----
http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=Y5PML15MGOPIQQSNDLPCKHSCJUNN2JVN?articleID=210602186
Transcript: Myhrvold of Intellectual Ventures
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| Nathan Myhrvold: The genesis of this idea was when I was at Microsoft. We had
| a problem with patent liability. All these people were coming to sue us or
| demand payment. And Bill (Gates) asked me to think about if there was a
| solution. This is what I came up with.
|
| WSJ: So you think that you're actually protecting companies from more
| settlements or bigger payments down the road?
`----
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122142717791833671.html
We doctor your patents, so be patent!
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| Unlike most other pure licensing companies, Intellectual Ventures hasn’t
| filed patent-infringement lawsuits to help force settlements. But the group
| lobbying on behalf of tech companies in Washington, the Coalition for Patent
| Fairness — which includes several companies that have been approached for
| licensing deals by Intellectual Ventures — says it is only a matter of
| time. “Since these thousands of patents only give [Intellectual Ventures] the
| right to stop others from making products, through lawsuits, it is obvious
| what they intend to do,” the group said in a statement.
|
| [...]
|
| As with short sellers, large companies don't like plays that can shake them
| up and expose their inadequacies, and will spend large amounts to PR /
| lobby / legislate them away - and as any small player who has tried to
| enforce patent abuse by large companies knows, it's virtually impossible to
| win and ruinously expensive to fight. So in that respect, aggregation is a
| good thing. Its hard to tell from this article if its just part of the PR war
| or whether there has been a real step up in the shakedown.
`----
http://broadstuff.com/archives/1246-We-doctor-your-patents,-so-be-patent!.html
Reforming the Patent System
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| Intellectual Ventures and its ilk are arguably the single biggest risk to
| America's continued leadership in technology and innovation. As dsquared
| elegantly put it in a comment here in May, the company might do a bit of R,
| but it doesn't do any D. Instead, it acts as a brake on any company wanting
| to do substantive R&D of its own, since there's a good chance Intellectual
| Ventures will have got there first, patented the idea, and then just decided
| to sit on it until somebody dares to violate it.
`----
http://www.portfolio.com/views/blogs/market-movers/2008/09/17/reforming-the-patent-system?tid=true
Acacia tops troll litigaition league
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| Acacia Technologies is the most litigious non-practising entity/troll (delete
| according to preference) in the United States. According to research done by
| PatentFreedom, which is featured in an article to be published in the next
| issue of IAM, Acacia has been involved in a total of 308 cases in the US
| courts, 239 of which have been filed since 2003. In second place is Rates
| Technology Inc, which has been involved in 130 cases – although just 38 have
| been over the last six years.
`----
http://www.iam-magazine.com/blog/Detail.aspx?g=31e01d61-2f07-488e-9e56-32a96383071e
Ideas Are Everywhere... So Why Do We Limit Them?
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| Gladwell uses this to talk up what Myhrvold is doing, suggesting that
| Intellectual Ventures is really about continuing that process, getting those
| ideas out there -- but he misses the much bigger point: if these ideas are
| the natural progression, almost guaranteed to be discovered by someone sooner
| or later, why do we give a monopoly on these ideas to a single discoverer?
| Myhrvold's whole business model is about monopolizing all of these ideas and
| charging others (who may have discovered them totally independently) to
| actually do something with them. Yet, if Gladwell's premise is correct (and
| there's plenty of evidence included in the article), then Myhrvold's efforts
| shouldn't be seen as a big deal. After all, if it wasn't Myhrvold and his
| friends doing it, others would very likely come up with the same thing sooner
| or later.
|
| This is especially highlighted in one anecdote in the article, of Myhrvold
| holding a dinner with a bunch of smart people... and an attorney. The group
| spent dinner talking about a bunch of different random ideas, with no real
| goal or purpose -- just "chewing the rag" as one participant put it. But the
| next day the attorney approached them with a typewritten description of 36
| different inventions that were potentially patentable out of the dinner. When
| a random "chewing the rag" conversation turns up 36 monopolies, something is
| wrong. Those aren't inventions that deserve a monopoly.
`----
http://techdirt.com/articles/20080507/0114581051.shtml
Related:
Who is the world's biggest patent troll?
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| In two consecutive days, The Wall Street Journal presented two different
| answers. The first is not surprising: Intellectual Ventures, the brainchild
| of ex-Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold. It's now out "to raise as much as
| $1 billion to help develop and patent inventions, many of them from
| universities in Asia."
`----
http://blogs.cnet.com/8301-13505_1-9816163-16.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
Playing Microsoft Patent Poker
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| This time though, while Ballmer slinks away to try to con … convince people
| that Microsoft Unified Communications somehow offers people more than what
| Cisco's VOIP (voice over IP) been offering customers for years, a patent
| attack finally launches at Linux. Specifically, IP Innovation, a subsidiary
| of Acacia Technologies Group, has filed a patent infringement claim against
| Linux distributors Novell and Red Hat.
|
| So was it just timing, or was it something more? Let's take a look at the
| players.
`----
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2201579,00.asp?kc=EWRSS03129TX1K0000616
Top Ten Patent Trolls of 2007
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| 3. Acacia. I didn't start tracking Acacia carefully until the summer. But
| still, on my blog I have reported on over two dozen lawsuits brought by
| Acacia this year, against more than 235 defendants. That's in addition to the
| over 200 lawsuits Acacia filed in previous years against hundreds and
| hundreds of defendants. And that's not including the two lawsuits (at least)
| Acacia has filed in December against 20 more defendants (yes, Acacia, I'm
| watching you). Acacia's business model, as a publicly traded company, is to
| accumulate patents and sue as many companies as possible in order to extract
| licenses. They have a market cap of over 275 million - that pays for a lot of
| lawsuits. Unlike other trolls, Acacia tends to not focus on one court in
| particular, although they have sampled the Eastern District of Texas more
| this year than in the past.
`----
http://trolltracker.blogspot.com/2007/12/top-ten-patent-trolls-of-2007.html
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