Investment Companies Backing Patent Trolls

greenbird sends us to Forbes for an account of billions in investments flowing to US patent troll companies. One example is DeepNines, who is suing McAfee over a patent that covers combining an IDS and firewall in a single device. The patent was filed on May 17, 2000 and issued on June 6, 2006. No prior art for that, no siree. DeepNines is funded by "an $8 million zero-coupon note to Altitude Capital Partners, a New York City private equity firm, promising in return a cut of any winnings stemming from the lawsuit. The payout is based on a formula that grants Altitude a percentage that decreases with a bigger award."

Re:You can't build a solid economy on IP.

[maxume]

Pish posh. The US has plenty of manufacturing capacity. Only recently has China started to overtake the US in exports of real goods(points 4,5 and 6):

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/evandavis/ 2007/04/the_state_of_trade.html [bbc.co.uk]

Note that the US is the largest exporter overall. Even foreign companies build many of their cars here:

http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1004876,0 0.html [time.com]
http://www.usatoday.com/money/autos/2007-03-22-ame rican-usat_N.htm [usatoday.com]

Re:You can't build a solid economy on IP.

[vux984]

That's crap.

No it isn't.

Lossy compression algorithms, for example, are clearly valuable, or people wouldn't use them.

No, they are clearly useful. That doesn't make it valuable. Value only shows up when there is scarcity.

That is why air, for example, which is essential to life is free. There is (currently) no scarcity.

A lossy compression algorithm, once thought up, is like air. There is be no scarcity of an idea once thought up, except through deliberate and artificial suppression.

At this stage, it takes little more to make an idea or algorithm infinitely available than a decision. In the past, replicating, ideas/algorithms/software/whatever and distributing them was enough of a chore that ideas algorithms and processes were literally scarce, and had value.

But today, in the 'internet age' the price of replicating and distributing information has dropped so close to zero that its almost irrelevant. The only thing that gives them any value, is our collective decision not to make 'unauthorized copies' in order to artificially prop up scarcity, and by extension prop up their value.

If we ever collectively chose not to, its game over for IP. There is nothing intrinsically scare about it (once created).

Patent is invalid -- prior art - 1999

[Anonymous Coward]

A company called Alteon Websystems Inc (acquired by Nortel in 2000) had a capability called WCR (Web Cache Redirection) which could be applied with a filter, that does EXACTLY what this patent claims. The feature had been in the product since 1998, maybe early 1999 at the latest. I deployed several web farms with this technology in early 1999, so I know its valid prior art. The WCR feature could be used to redirect ANY traffic, after it was passed through a set of firewall rules, a final firewall rule would forward it to a server.

Re:Prior Art

[kripkenstein]

Prior art is irrelevant to these people. In the Alcatel Lucent case MS believed they had legitimately licensed the patents they were later sued over

Umm, what? What is the connection between prior art and the supposed 'belief' Microsoft had that they did have a license?

Prior art can be used to invalidate a patent (or prevent it being issued in the first place). The Microsoft-Alacatel case wasn't about that. It was that Microsoft had a patent license from Fraunhofer, but the issue at hand - MP3s - consists of various functionalities (recording, playback, streaming, etc.), only a few of which were covered by Fraunhofer patents. Other functionalities were covered by Alcatel patents. Therefore Microsoft lost. It doesn't matter that Microsoft 'believed' they had a patent license, what matters is if they actually had a license to all relevant patents. The court ruled that they didn't.

Anyhow, regarding TFA, it is always good to see an article in a mainstream financial publication (Forbes) that is critical of patent trolling.