Nathan Myhrvold and the Business Of Invention

elwinc writes "There's a great New Yorker story about Nathan Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures company, whose business model is to nurture ideas, write patents, and sell them. Apparently they're filing about 500 patents a year including a passive thorium reactor which consumes waste from conventional reactors. On the lighter side, you can read how Nathan has achieved 'dominant T. rex market share.'" Though we've discussed Myhrvold and his company in the past, the New Yorker focuses more on how incredible it is to have a group of very intelligent people sitting around a table developing ideas.

Re:Ideas

[explosivejared]

Implementations have value. For example, I could probably sit down and write a decent enough patent for a perpetual motion machine to where the patent office would accept it. Now obviously no such machine could be implemented. So here in lies the problem with this company's approach and the general approach of any patent troll, it is easy to come with ideas when you sit there and detach your thinking from the scientific method. Such imaginations make for great novelists and storytellers, but they make for very poor engineers and businessmen. Anyone can look at a problem and identify a solution that would work. The real skill comes in finding a solution that works in reality and then being able to back up your findings by properly and effectively implementing your solution.

All in all, I agree with the parent, this company is a leech. It sucks value out of the economy while adding none in return.

Re: "passive thorium reactor"

[Kjella]

Uh, the basic idea with the patent system was that you'd get a patent so investors with money couldn't just take your idea and run with it themselves.

No patents:
1. Come up with good idea
2. Talk to investors about idea
3. Investors run with it themselves
4. No profit

Patents:
1. Come up with good idea
2. Patent idea
3. Talk to investors about idea
4. Make the product with investors
5. Profit

Least, that was the idea with the big engineering patents at least. With the "soft" patents that are basicly done the moment you put the drivel down on paper, I agree it doesn't make much sense. Sadly the current state is more like trolls patent bits A, B and C which don't work, then someone figures out to build a real product ABCXYZ which actually works, then gets sued to hell. Oh well...

Elisha Gray and the telephone

[Anonymous Coward]

English majors who write on scientific matters for laymen seem to delight in such unexpected phenomena as near-simultaneous discovery and invention by geniuses working independently.

At least one researcher has come up with a more prosaic explanation [amazon.com] for the coincidental telephone patent filings - he believes that Bell bribed a patent office employee to show him Gray's filing, after which Bell returned to his lab, completely revised his approach, and soon re-filed with a description of his triumphant "invention".

This strikes me as entirely believable. I've learned that even among highly educated engineers, there are pathological liars who have no qualms about taking credit for excellent work done by others, if they think they can get away with it. Think of it as the engineering version of "Bosnian sniper fire". And don't believe everything you see on a resume.

Good not evil?

[Frosty Piss]

Though we've discussed Myhrvold and his company in the past, the New Yorker focuses more on how incredible it is to have a group of very intelligent people sitting around a table developing ideas.

Filing about 500 patents a year...

Oh, I see, these are good patents not evil patents. Yes...

THAT Nathan Myhrvold...

[Anonymous Coward]

And don't forget, this is the Nathan Myhrvold who asserted (while working for Microsoft) that Microsoft deserved a cut of every transaction made over the internet.

Re:Right, and here's how to fix it...

[darthflo]

Your patent troll's 500th patent of the year costs $6.54678121579228e+152 to file. Even Bill Gates is starting to think that's real money.

I like that general idea, but it just wouldn't work:
- Patent trolls like Intellectual Ventures could simply start tons of shell companies. If the cost of creating one of these was, say, $1k, they'd get themselves some 167 "independent subdivisions", getting the price down to $800 per patent.
- Some giant companies may actually come up with lots and lots of ideas. The likes of IBM, Bosch (iirc those guys file tons of patents), Microsoft or even Apple probably spend more than Int. Ventures' annual revenue on their R&D departments' janitors' coffee (if available). To add at least a touch of fairness, they'd need to be entitled to more patents, probably on a sliding scale based on the number of employees.

Re:Ideas

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup. Interestingly, that's exactly what happened with the Wright brothers.

We think that they invented the world's first aircraft (untrue, but let's not go into that now). They thought their big advance was solving the problem of aircraft control (which they had, but in a cumbersome and essentially dead-end way, with wing warping).

Did they advertise this for the benefit of humanity, like Santos-Dumont did? No, they patented it and tried to force all aircraft designers to pay them money. Of course, this only worked in the US, so before long France, Britain, Russia and Germany were designing all kinds of aircraft, while development in the US had ceased.

When WW1 came we had to buy fighters from the French - we had no industry of our own.

I sometimes laugh at the plaudits offered to the Wrights, when the only thing they really did was SUPRESS American development of aircraft for 15 years.....