World's Largest Patent Troll Fires First Salvo 189
ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes "Yesterday the biggest software patent troll of all finally woke from its slumbers: Intellectual Ventures filed patent infringement complaints in the US District Court of Delaware against companies in the software security, DRAM and Flash memory, and field-programmable gate array industries. Intellectual Ventures was co-founded by Microsoft's former CTO Nathan Myhrvold, with others from Intel and a Seattle-based law firm." We discussed IV's potential for patent trollery last spring.
Good? (Score:3)
Good, I think. Hopefully this will finally cause big companies to fight to get rid of software patents and patent troll companies as a whole.
Actually the Article Notes RPX Corp. (Score:5, Interesting)
Good, I think. Hopefully this will finally cause big companies to fight to get rid of software patents and patent troll companies as a whole.
Actually, the response has not been to rid the world of software patents as you so hoped and the threat of Intellectual Ventures has long been affecting companies. From the article:
The threat posed by Intellectual Ventures helped prompt the rise of firms like RPX Corp. It is paid by companies to buy up potentially threatening patents; the companies receive licenses to those patents, and RPX pledges never to sue over them.
Think about that for a second. The system for software patents is so screwed up and backwards that it's cheaper to pay someone to buy up a patent and promise to never sue over it than it is for you to build a patent war chest and wait for the big one to hit. It's like patent insurance. Easily the most interesting thing in the article to me. Unfortunately this shows tolerance and a way to move forward.
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Who makes money from the current patent system? Lawyers, on both sides. We should change the laws.
What kind of people get elected to Congress?
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20071025191741AAnHym8 [yahoo.com]
Oh crap.
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Completely agree. Either a massive overhaul or throw out the entire patent system or at least the software part. It does no one any good except for lawyers.
At the very least, implement something like if a patent has not been actively developed into a product within two years, and/or if that product is not available to the public from five years of patent issue, then the patent becomes invalid and is automatically released into the public domain. This would keep patents to their true purpose - idea sharin
Troll'd (Score:3)
You've been troll'd!
Have a nice day!
Troll'd [youtube.com]
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Oh the weather outside is frightful,
But the fire is so delightful,
And since we've no place to go,
You've been troll'd, You've been troll'd! You've been troll'd!
It's a bit early, but I could'nt help myself. Merry Christmas! :D
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...Have a nice day!
Here in Canada, we say:
Have an ice day !
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Close, but it's actually: "Have an ice day, eh?"
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Eh. ;-)
Good. (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe it's optimistic. Maybe it will all settle down into a cartel and the patent threat to small players will remain. But if the patent trolls are greedy enough to really take a bite out of the hand that feeds them, perhaps not.
Re:Good. (Score:5, Insightful)
To put in the perspective of world politics, the big companies are like Russia, China, or the US. Each has significant assets to protect, making MAD a viable way to protect themselves.
The patent trolls are like North Korea or Iran; they have no real assets to protect and nothing of significant value that can be destroyed (assuming you don't give a damn about people or jobs, which they don't).
So as long as the big companies have something to protect, the North Koreas and Irans of the business world will continue to harass them until the rules change.
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A few super-powers having nuclear weapons gives them a game advantage over the non-nuclear powers. But when that strategy fails, it is better for them to have everyone disarmed and fall back on their mighty
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Sorry.
H.
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The patent trolls are like North Korea or Iran; they have no real assets to protect and nothing of significant value that can be destroyed
Not really. "The economy of Iran is the eighteenth largest economy in the world by purchasing power parity" [wikipedia.org]. Iran has lots of oil and gas. And the people in charge do have something to lose: power, control, influence, personal wealth. Same thing for the guys at the top of the North Korean system.
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The trouble is any overhaul of the system prompted by big business is going to largely help big business only.
There is a chance our lawmakers could be reasonable, and evaluate things with both big business and the general public's interests in mind, but lets face it, they don't exactly have a history of being calm, rational, and reasonable.
Take the current tax cut extension debate: The (liberal) democrats want to screw the rich, even if they have to screw the poor and middle class to do it. The Republican
swine... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:swine... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Most capitalism is and always has been about imaginary property.
Here, I'll show you. You go build me a car factory, and in return, I'll give you a shiny number of your very own. Then you give some of your number back to me and in return I'll give you a car from my factory.
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Faith in the buying power of currency is what gives it value, because without it, the exchange of goods would be so unnecessarily difficult as to significantly hinder the
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I think that's a good argument to get people to stop calling it "imaginary property". Things like currency and many forms of contract (retainers, rental agreements, etc.) fit under an intuitive definition of "imaginary property" and not under one of "intellectual property".
Twisting words like that to inject your opinions has always struck me as juvenile. I don't mean to pick on anybody here in particular -- slashdot has its jargon. But imagining this term at the outset makes me think of a grown man heckl
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You are very much correct.
We have intellectual property because we decided a long time ago that ideas have value. If they have value, should it not be possible to buy, sell, or trade them? And if they can be bought, sold, or traded, are ideas then not a form of property that can be owned?
It is certainly very different than ordinary property, and so special rules must apply, but it is most certainly real.
People get confused by these things often, but the fact that it does not have an physical form that you
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Hardware stores, Sears, auto dealerships, pawn shops, grocery stores, shoe stores, firework stores, doctor practices, etc. That's real property.
Most of capitalism is not about imaginary property. And if you had a large company that scaled up by employing hundreds or thousands of people only to have (cough) Chinese companies come in an steal your special sauce, you'd suddenly find imaginary property is your hundreds or thousands of employees being laid off. Them are imaginary property.
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Well, who is to blame, the car factory guy, or the guy who voluntarily built it, knowing this is what he would get in exchange (not that this is really all he gets in reality, but I'll play allong with your hypothetical)?
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Well, this is American capitalism at its finest, and it's the logical conclusion of the way they do things. The whole ACTA treaty is so that patent-trolls and IP lawyers can sue every last motherfucker on the planet.
The American notion of capitalism is the most bloated, fucked up, and protectionist thing you can imagine. For a country that constantly says how much they want the free market and free trade, they do everything they poss
I for one welcome... (Score:2)
these Intellectual Vulture Overlords.
< / s a r c a s m >
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those Intellectual Vultire Overlords
</sarcasm>
There, sorted that for you!
Legal Blackmail (Score:4, Interesting)
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RICO only applies to *criminal* acts.
Unless you can prove extortion, RICO won't even be in town, let alone knocking at the door. And since patent infringement is a *civil* matter, good luck with that.
Thing is that patents are such a mess that it's hard to establish that the lawsuits are frivolous.
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Just Like Copyright (Score:5, Insightful)
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The evil twist being that they buy patents from inventors willing to sell their patents to them?
How is the intention to protect inventors thwarted by allowing inventors to sell their inventions to a business rather than develop a business themselves?
How is the intention to protect inventors thwarted by allowing them to sell to anyone who can meet their price, whether the business manufactures something u
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Why would they bother buying any patent off the inventor when they can just spin off 10 or so trivial patents on any of the even slight variations of the concept?
They then rip off the concept and sell their own liscences and if the real inventor objects they can just threaten to use their own 10 patents against his 1 and tie him up in court until his cute little startup bites the dust.
then they buy the patent for a song when his startup fails and is liquidated.
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The evil twist being that they buy patents from inventors willing to sell their patents to them?
No, the evil twist being that they sit on the patents, not using them, hoping that if someone concurrently develops something similar, they can use any patents of a similar nature to beat the ever-living fuck out of the new guy in court for patent infringement unless he pays them a hefty fee. Thus patents are punishing inventors.
You're kinda dumb, aren't you?
But they got TAX BREAKS (Score:2, Insightful)
I thought the justification for continuing tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans was that it would help the economy, because investment would trickle down through innovation / job creation. Here is a wonderful counter point to that argument.
If we want to entice the wealthy to use money to create jobs, why don't tie their rewards directly to job creation? These people are actually killing the economy and making people poor by creating a money-sink in the economy where no value is added. They are not onl
Re:But they got TAX BREAKS (Score:4, Insightful)
Your logic is impecable; however, it will bounch straight off of market fundamentalists. The economy of imaginary things is precisely what the new world order stands for, and an expression of the correctness of laisezz-faire capitalism. Railing against it is totalitarian, and will just interfer with wealth creation and freedom. Interesting that wealth is created out of imaginary things that are meaningless, trivial, and detrimental to getting real work done. But, in the words of one venture capitalist: IP is the new gold. The economy has to grow somehow -- and that is the ultimate rationalisation for this madness.
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His logic isn't impecable (sic) nor impeccable. His unfounded assumption is that the wealthy are not using money to create jobs. Very few of the wealthy are patent trolls as the gp seems to think. He's arguing that the few examples he thinks he sees allow him to damn a whole class.
Many of the wealthy got there by investing in companies that produce jobs. Some greedy have destroyed jobs, but one doesn't need to be wealthy to be greedy as legions of Business School Product will attest.
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No, many of the wealthy got there by knowing how to game the system, or by inheriting their wealth. Why do you think so many freighters and other resources are registered out of the Bahamas, or Indonesia, or place like that, when their owner is the whitest mofo ever, and with no vested interest in the point of registration? Because it's orders of magnitude cheaper. Same with bank accounts and housing. The reason the rich stay rich is they can afford to spend *some* money up front to find the cheapest way to
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Your logic is impecable; however, it will bounch straight off of market fundamentalists.
"Market fundamentalists" aren't even self-consistent. Corporations exist solely due to interference in the free market by the Nanny State in the form of various Companies Acts.
A "truly free" market would have no corporations, as it would not permit limited liability for individuals. That liability limitation is a huge interference with the legal basis of a free market.
And because corporations would not exist in a free market, they cannot reasonably expect to operate in one: the state, which protects corp
Re:But they got TAX BREAKS (Score:4, Insightful)
I thought the justification for continuing tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans was that it would help the economy, because investment would trickle down through innovation / job creation.
"Trickle down economics" is rank bullshit. Wealth doesn't trickle down, it flows up. Wealth is created on the factory floor, the programmer's cube, the fry cook's stove. The wealthy do not create wealth, they control wealth.
Giving a rich man money doesn't give him any incentive to put it into the economy at all, let alone create jobs. If business is bad and he can't sell many of his wares, no tax break will induce him to hire. The only way he's going to hire is if demand for his product outstrips his capacity to supply it.
If you want to stimulate job creation, you give tax breaks to the middle clas and poor. Especially the poor, who have to spend that money out of necessity. They spend that extra money on goods that the rich man's employees creates, and if they buy enough, the rich man will have to hire to meet the demand.
Don't give a tax break to the rich for hiring the poor, give it to the poor themselves.
Note that most poor in the US are, in fact, workers.
Intel vs. McAfee via IV (Score:5, Interesting)
Neal Stephenson has a hand in this (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Neal Stephenson has a hand in this (Score:5, Insightful)
I once knew someone who was naive enough to confuse a patent troll operation with a real Menlo Park skunkworks/invention lab.
She was 22 years old and looking for a job; what's Stephenson's excuse?
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Maybe they actually do research there? From the Wikipedia page, they've done work on a nuke reactor that can burn uranium waste or thorium, the mosquito laser, and modeling of Malaria spread via mosquitoes, among other things.
Maybe it's something like Microsoft Research (cool) vs Microsoft (uncool).
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From the Wikipedia page, they've done work on a nuke reactor that can burn uranium waste or thorium,
It's unclear how original their research is, though. From the brief article I read on them a few years ago, they had patented several inventions related to Thorium power without actually developing any prototypes. Meanwhile, there were actual companies in Russia developing real Thorium reactors. It's got to be awfully depressing to pour millions into developing a working prototype only to find that some
Re:Neal Stephenson has a hand in this (Score:4, Insightful)
There, fixed that for you Mr. Stephenson.
This is good news. (Score:2)
Abuses of the law lead to reform.
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While I'm sure your world is all shiny and pretty, and I don't want to spoil it for you ... I'm not convinced what you say is true.
"Intellectual Property" is what America is betting the whole farm on -- I fail to see how it would be possible to rein in the law with regards to copyright, patents, and what-not.
Do you see anything falling into the public domain that was ever published by an American company? Do you see anything to do with "fair use" being upheld? Do you see a
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Well, I know they've extended copyright to absurd terms ... have they tried doing it to patents yet? I'm sure if some people had their way, those patents would never lapse either.
It seems like the lawmakers keep giving companies what they want at the expense of the rest of us.
Correction (Score:2)
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There will be no sanity from the Patent Office while they directly benefit from patent renewal fees, fees that are the bulk of the PTO revenues. Th
Intellectual Ventures' ad campaign (Score:2)
It's obvious what their company theme song should be: Never Gonna Give You Up
Trolls aren't the biggest problem (Score:5, Informative)
Below are links to background info, but keep in mind that trolls create a tax, but they're not the big problem. They're generally not the patent holders that break standards or exclude free software projects. They're just after money, so they are parasites to the rich. The MPEG-LA patents, for example, are much more harmful (they blocked HTML5 from including a standard video format) and are held by "real" software companies.
swpat.org is a publicly editable wiki, help welcome.
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Windfall profits (Score:2)
What! What! What! (Score:2)
Maybe they should sue Rambus, who from what I can hear is suing everybody again.... seems like their patents might infringe on some of these patents.
Typo (Score:3)
We just need an anti-troll law (Score:2)
Well, we need more than that, but starting with an anti-troll law would be a great start. Such law might go something like this:
The Jeff Foxworthy "You might be a Patent Troll"
1. If you own a patent and have no intention of actually making something with it, ... ... ...?
2. If you have a bunch of patents and are trying to extract a bunch of money from a bunch of companies,
3. If you
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And even if you aren't, you just gave someone a foul idea.
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There probably isn't but there should be. That's really how these trolls get their abilities.
I think I would like to see some sort of compulsory licensing scheme to avoid patent litigation in which after X many years, any patent holder would have to license their patent out for some standard fee that would change depending on if they produced anything the patent covered or not.
Re:My question about IV... (Score:4, Insightful)
Even if there is, do you go to the patent office every time you do something obvious just to check whether the idiots granted a patent on it without having a clue just that they just patented the equivalent of the wheel?
Re:My question about IV... (Score:5, Informative)
Well, the original Slashdot article linked in TFS indicates that "it doesn't actually use these patents – except to threaten people with. In other words, Intellectual Ventures is a patent troll". They only license their patent portfolio. Expect this to basically be a shakedown.
Man, I hate that a company can exist just to own patents and sue people.
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this is the first time they've actually made *themselves* vulnerable.
going through subsidiaries is one thing but the end result here is that IV might get screwed (hopefully).
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Wait, I'm confused ... the one link the summary mentions nothing about subsidiaries, so I don't understand ... how might they be making themselves vulnerable?
Sorry if that's a thick sounding question, not done my first coffee yet. :-P
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Oh No, They Do Much More Than That! (Score:5, Informative)
They only license their patent portfolio.
Oh, how I wish that was all that they did. As you can see from their site [intellectualventures.com]:
Intellectual Ventures has been actively inventing since August 2003. The company has filed thousands of patent applications in more than 50 technology areas and has thousands of ideas under consideration.
Since 2003 they have been gumming up the USPTO as well. Note that they've filed thousands of patent applications. No mention of how many were issued. It's entirely possible that they were issued to the actual people working at IV and not to IV but a search shows nine patents issued to IV [uspto.gov] on the USPTO.
So remember the TED Laser Mosquito/Malaria technology [slashdot.org]? That's just a patent waiting to be issued then licensed [intellectualventures.com] but until then I wouldn't recommend building any.
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So they are a double troll. They don't actually make anything, that would leave them open to patent trolls. Instead, they come up with *new* ideas and wrap patents around them only to use them as sueballs.
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Since 2003 they have been gumming up the USPTO as well. Note that they've filed thousands of patent applications.
And it has paid application fees, search fees, and examination fees on every one of them. The Patent Office is entirely supported by fees. IV isn't "gumming up the Patent Office." In a sense that's not even possible. As long as a decent number of the applications issue as patents and IV pays maintenance fees on them, then they're fully paying their own way.
And it's still small potatoes compar
You Misunderstand Me (Score:5, Insightful)
I suspect Intellectual Ventures spends a nice chunk of it's money on forcing patents through the system. Thousands of patents that evidently have little business being patents. But their legion of lawyers persists pushing these patents and revisioning them. Yes, they pay thousands of dollars on each patent to do this but this is an abuse of the patent system if they do this just because they have money.
Imagine if this first salvo results in hundreds of millions of dollars going to IV. Then what? Then that money goes into putting more strain on the USPTO and more lawyers are hired to push unwarranted patents through the system. Then those win more suits and more lawyers are hired in a classic breeder model of lawyer propagation. If my calculations are correct, by the year 2054 the Earth will be a mass of patent lawyers expanding outward at the speed of light only to eventually collapse back in on itself causing a "Big Crunch" and ending the universe until the next big bang. Intellectual Ventures must be stopped (with apologies to Stanislaw Lem).
But seriously, the two are totally different in that one produces and one sues.
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The difference is that a high rate of IBM's patents are granted.
What evidence do you have that IV's patents are also not granted at a high rate? It takes years for a typical application to go through the examination process even without any appeals. It's not surprising that IV has only had a few patents granted so far. IBM's 4000+ patents granted in 2008 were mostly filed years ago.
This is proper use of the patent system because IBM then makes those products.
What evidence do you have that all, most, or
Re:Oh No, They Do Much More Than That! (Score:5, Funny)
ddos the patent office, everyone file hundreds of patents.
*chuckles*
Oh Anonymous Coward, not all of life's problems can be solved with a DDOS. Like when my girlfriend left me last week and blocked my phone number -- calling her until her voice mail was full from work and friend's phones did no good.
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You aren't DDOSing enough - you need to branch out from just phones, and try and contact her in a variety of ways. It's like you're only trying to connect on one port. You need to be spamming her inbox, visitting her at work, at home, when she's out at dinner, you need to be leaving love letters EVERYWHERE she might go, you need to be outside her window blaring music from a boombox...
Trust me. It works*.
Hate to One Up Ya But ... (Score:5, Funny)
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What are you trying to do? Set him up with Bubba in the back of D-wing of cell block 6 when he goes to jail for stalking her? Getting him another girlfriend this way might not be the best situation.
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That's just a DOS attack from more than one node*, it's no wonder it didn't work.
You have to get five of your buddies together and all call at once - THEN it's a DDOS, and my god that would be hell!
It wouldn't get her to come back to you though, so if that's what you really want it will still do no good. If you want to simply make her life hell then it will work wonderfully.
*Multiple nodes must be attacking at the same time for it to be a DDOS.
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"...calling her until her voice mail was full from work and friend's phones did no good."
And if I were your employer and happened upon this thread I'd be feeling SO GOOD about your employment with my firm right now...
Re:Oh No, They Do Much More Than That! (Score:4, Interesting)
Unfortunately people have been doing this ceaselessly for the last decade+. The only thing that has accomplished is cause the USPTO to get significantly sloppier in their work. The result of which is simply an ever growing body of patents with overly broad terms, little regard for prior art, etc. In short, it has only made the trolls stronger and more abundant.
With respect to goods/service producing companies, patents are no longer about protecting R&D investments. Rather it's about ensuring a defense using the M.A.D. doctrine is in place to safeguard their future ability to conduct business. Unfortunately, M.A.D. cannot be established against a patent holding corporation such as I.V. since no one has yet figured out how to patent aspects of the patenting process. These trolls, and I would assert patents in general, are one of the biggest hindrances to the U.S. economy. This is putting us at a significant competitive disadvantage to the rest of the world and it's only going to get worse.
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Man, I hate that a company can exist just to own patents and sue people.
You do realize that category includes a large number of universities and colleges, right? And publicly funded research labs?
What about companies that received a patent but decided not to pursue the technology themselves? Do they just have to eat the cost of the R&D? Or investors in a company that went bankrupt? They can't recoup any of their investment through the sale of the patent portfolio? Those scenarios are two major sour
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Again the difference is in the production. Universities, colleges and research labs still produce things. IV does not. They file patents based on "ideas' (as opposed to something they've developed - which makes me wonder if every patent they file shouldn't violate the whole "you can't patent obvious things" rule) and sit on patents they've purchased. No original research and development goes on there - they are lawyers, not creators.
As for your questions - yes, companies that develop something and choos
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Universities, colleges and research labs still produce things. IV does not
You are aware that the patents at issue in these suits were mostly acquired from companies that produce products, right? That these are mostly not IV's own patents?
No original research and development goes on there - they are lawyers, not creators.
This is plainly false. IV employs quite a few creative people. Just check their job listings [taleo.net]. I see positions for scientific modelers, computational scientists, fuel performance analysts,
Re:My question about IV... (Score:5, Interesting)
Man, I hate that a company can exist just to own patents and sue people.
Under the current patent system, this company type is likely to be the most profitable. By not actually utilising any patents, they are free from any claims of patent infringement. This means that all of those companies which have built up huge patent war chests with the aim of a "mutually assured destruction" if they are ever sued suddenly become vulnerable. There is no "patent war" defense against a company that doesn't make anything. If you don't make anything, you can't be countersued. From a business perspective it's an awesome idea. If Nokia were to set up an independent legal entity and assign ownership of their patents to that entity, that legal entity could then sue Apple without any fear of being countersued. Apple could do the same. I'm surprised we haven't seen any large companies doing this earlier, but if IV is successful, I bet we'll see a lot more of this company type in the future.
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Better to nuke the whole site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure. :-P
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Permit me to play devil's advocate here.
Let's say you're an inventor. You're great at understanding mechanical problems from angles other haven't thought of. But you don't know anything about finance, managing suppliers, running a factory, marketing or selling. So what you do is you license your patents to people who do know those things. Because you do have common sense you form a corporation to handle the licensing in order to limit your liabilities.
Are you a patent troll because you don't *make* anyth
Yes, Per Patent (Score:5, Informative)
Will IV allow licensing of their patent portfolio, or will they do like a lot of companies, just get patents so nobody else can use them?
Well, from their their website [intellectualventures.com] they list all their "products" and services:
The first bullet appears to answer your question that yes, they do. But when you say "patent portfolio" I don't think you'll find anyone with enough cash to access to the whole portfolio, most likely it's one license to one patent at a time. I think their big "product" is providing a service to liquidate your patent very easily (like a pawn shop for patents) so far. This salvo may change that.
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According to the authors, IV exists to provide a mass market for IP by acting as a clearinghouse. They purchase patents (from anyone, but that does include small-time engineers/inventors without the capital to develop their creation) and solicit other companies to license them. They also do a fair bit of inventing themselves (including some awesome environmental engineering devices intended to stop g
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yeah - I saw Delaware and was thinking the same - Patent Trolls file in eastern Texas where the judge just hands the trolls money without any real fight.
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http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/11/10/1651236 [slashdot.org]
Re:I own a patent. (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, you could sell your patent if that's the best way of capitalising on it. But whether that's good or bad depends on other factors - mainly the validity of your patent. If you just patented an idea that would likely occur to other people and sat on it until someone else did think of it and then sued over it... That would be bad. You've contributed nothing and caused a destructive effect. If you were an independent research chemist who came up with an innovative new process after much testing and it's far from obvious, then by all means approach another company and sell or licence your patent. But you see the difference between the two examples is not whether or not the patent has been sold. It's whether the patent has been originally awarded to someone or some group that actually added to society with their original contribution. What companies like this do, is file as many stupid obvious or natural ideas as they can and then look for someone else to independently stumble into the same area before pouncing.
The answer to the question of whether you have the right to sell the patent, is actually more, do you have the right to a patent. I.e. did you come up with something genuinely original, either through your unique genius or more likely careful testing and research, that has added to society's capability, or did you write down "a website could have a 'one-click' button that lets you buy things" and wait for someone to implement it.
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If I am unable to raise enough capital to launch my invention properly into a marketplace, is it socially acceptable to sell it to an entity such as IV?
"Socially" depends on the society. If you hang out on Slashdot, it's socially acceptable to rip off people's work and investments because "copying isn't theft", doesn't mean there isn't real world harm. You have to follow your own conscience and reasoning. But yes, if you've legitimately contributed something original and non-obvious to the World but lack the capital, means or time to develop it yourself, sure, it's not wrong to sell that on and say: "this is worth a hundred-thousand dollars, but would tak
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"Socially" depends on the society. If you hang out on Slashdot, it's socially acceptable to rip off people's work and investments because "copying isn't theft",
As well as if you hand out any place else in the world. Since everyone thinks that "copying isn't theft". The ones that claim they think copying is theft just don't count the copying they do.
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Good luck with the whole advancing mankind thing.
H.
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Let's say you have a patent. Advertise it fool. You HAVE the patent, what are you scared of? Otherwise I doubt you actually have a patent, or suppose it to be weak & possibly invalid.
The correct thing to do is shop it around to companies that could actually use the patent as more than just legal leverage. The wost thing you can do is to sell it to a Troll that will only use the patent as a legal vice to wring money from useful businesses. This is how a troll can get you, you think they will shop th
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You're kidding right?
The lawyer guild is going to be making a *fourtune* processing these cases.