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An inside look at Intellectual Ventures
A reader writes"Nathan Myhrvold has started a multi-hundred million dollar firm to develop new inventions and patent them. It has remained a very secretive organization, despite recruiting reclusive geniuses and buying up thousands of patents from other companies. Now Business Week has the scoop: "As his cash-rich firm snaps up thousands of patents, fears emerge that it will become a leader in litigation - not innovation..."
There's one thing I don't understand, patents are a US thing. What if a company develops elsewhere something patented in the US, is that legal? Or will they not be able to market it in the US?
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
Oh, and if you think putting something in the public domain prevents some company from patenting it, think again. Sun has a patent application on stuff I put into the public domain 3 years ago. People have suggested I write to the USPTO or something. Wake up! I don't make any money from open source and it's not me who's being impacted. It's the people who would use the open source software who would be affected and *they* need to do something if they want to use it. If the public doesn't want to protect their own rights, then the public be damned.
These kinds of companies are hardly new:
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Since patents reward being the first to come up with an idea, not being the first to come up with a way of turning that idea into reality, getting a couple of industry-specialists/bright-people in a room and asking them to imagine what kind of things there might exist in the future is a very good way of getting a lot of patents, some of which will become money makers - some companies have already made it their business model to get patents this way, sit on them until somebody does de actual work of truning them into reality, and then squeeze those people for all they can.
I wouldn't be surprised to find out that somebody out there is picking ideas from Science Fiction books and patenting them
The only news here is that Business Week has picked this up - hopefully this is an indication that there is a growing awareness in business circles of how broken the patent system really is.
Or in otherwords, imagine a Beowulf Cluster (pardon the phrase) of Open Source patent filers. Intellectual Ventures wouldn't stand a chance.
Personally, I'm very opposed to Software Patents, as the EFF is. However, I can really see no other way of effectively changing the system in the near term other than this. Especially if, every so often, one files a suit against a closed-source company, and ends up with hundreds of millions of dollars to fund futher suits (E.g. What happened with RIM and their Blackberries).
I can well imagine that, if you make the big companies scream loudly enough, by hitting them where it hurts, they will end up running to Congress for protection. And, if done right, the only protection is eliminating Software Patents.
Aside from the distastefulness of dealing with Software Patents, I can so no reason why this type of strategy won't work. If anyone can spot what I'm missing from a strategic view, I'd appreciate knowing about it.
The best way to predict the future is to create it. - Peter Drucker.
Sounds like they plan on breaking the system, the camels back, with a mass of sudden weight.
good!
What's the difference between Apple or Microsoft plunging millions of dollars into R&D and then licensing their technology out to other companies? Isn't this exactly the same?
Well, for a start, MS and Apple are likely to implement the inventions themselves, as well as licensing them to others. That's much, much more important than it may seem at first - by implementing them, it quickly becomes obvious that the patent exists. If you patent something and sit on it, then someone else has the same idea, it's a lot less likely that they'll spot the patent, if they believe they're the first to have the idea. That allows for much greater scope for surprise litigation.
Wake up people, fear mongering about this company is completely misdirected, they have a good opportunity to do a lot of good, the true fear that should be exposed here is the ability to abuse the intellectual property laws in america, IV has nothing to do with it.
I agree, up to a point. They do have a good opportunity to do a lot of good, but they also have equal opportunity to do a lot of harm. Until such time as they show their hand one way or the other, you'll have to forgive me for being suspicious of them.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
So if you invented the lightbulb, but lacked the capital to do anything about it, would it be OK if someone else came along and invented it after you who did have the capital to bring it to market? If you invented it, why shouldn't you get the benefits for your hard work and insight?
If only the people with the means to fully develop ideas have the right to Intellectual Property protection, the little guy with new ideas will perpetually be screwed.
Steve
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
In my opinion, the law as it is is unfixable. The very structure of monopoly rights is inherently unbalanced and is an aberration in a free market, one whose costs are huge but unaccounted for, while the benefits in terms of innovation and rewards to actual inventors are dubious.
Redesign the system as stipend rights instead, conferring, in exchange for disclosure, the right to an actual monetary payout upon a certain level of use of the invention in question. That way the system is automatically balanced; with a standard government budget the costs are controllable (government spending tendencies aside), if too many 'patent stipends' are granted, the rewards for each shrink so all involved parties have an interest in only valid ones being granted. Companies would not need fear litigation; they could browse the patent databases as they please and just note which ones they include, combine and mix and match, etc. The litigation burden would go down; the inventor would not need to sue anyone for using their invention; the more the better, as their payout would increase.
Financing such a system isnt really that hard, once you accept that the current system isnt as 'free' as it seems, but is actually more or less equivalent to a taxation on new technology (which is _not_ a good thing, as it slows adoption rates even more). A flat 'innovation VAT' rate would be a large improvement, or even better, rates geared towards phasing out undesireable old technology. But above all, it should be accounted for, with measurable economic impact, not the current 'more or less years that does something or the other that we cant really tell to innovation and costs but you dont see it as it's in the price of goods and insurances'.
What is really slick was how this guy just milked several geniuses for idea, and he won't have to pay them for it. The whole "meeting" where he's asking top notch people in their field to come up with improvements on state of the art - this was his way of getting all the ideas to patent, and he doesn't have to reward any of it back to the people who came up with the ideas since they probably, (and stupidly) gave it up to him by coming to his "innovation conference"."
e quests_mo.html ). It is thus not sufficient to just toss out cool ideas and get patents on them. You have to provide some documentation on how to actually build the thing.
From TFA:
The goal wasn't just incremental advances but multibillion-dollar lightning bolts that could change the world and, not incidentally, make all of the participants rich.
Presumably, "all of the participants" include the people who came up with the ideas. I'm sure they were compensated for their time in one way or another and I'm also sure that every one of them knew what the purpose of the conference was. If they agreed to come and give ideas, that is their business.
So, this guy, by patenting ideas, no matter how bogus they may be, will gain a lot of ability to stop anyone and everyone from practicing anything he comes up with. In effect - he'll be rich without every actually producing any working product - just patenting all sorts of new potential ideas that may or may not come to be."
Typically when you file a patent you also have to provide an embodiment of the best way to implement the thing being patented. This is one reason why recently a patent for a "warp drive" was rejected by the USPTO - no workable implementation was provided ( http://patentlaw.typepad.com/patent/2006/02/pto_r
Even if let's say he does allow the person who was in the room who came up with the idea - I guarentee that the patent will be assigned to his corporation since he "reimbursed" that "inventor" for their time with payment - i.e. whatever he paid them to come to his innovation conference."
This is typical. As an engineer, every company I have ever worked for has had me sign an intellectual property agreement as part of the condition of employement - that every idea I come up with belongs to my employer. Though my name is listed on the patents I have, they belong to my employers. I voluntarily agreed to this so that I could get the job. I'm sure all participants invited to the conference were made aware of what the purpose of the conference was, and the participants either volunteered or were or will be compensated in some way.
Steve
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
The problem with patents is way deeper that that. The big problem is not now, but 20+ years from now as society will likely start to enter the replication age and 3d-printer/nano/bio technologies will eventually shift manufacturing away from the factory and back into the home. When this happens, some people will see this as a way to create tremendous wealth by offering creation related services. Unfortunately, others will see this as an opportunity to extract nearly infinite licensing royalities. In sum, manufacturing will become commoditized and there will be this huge pressure for the powers that be to coerce themsleves into every aspect of peoples private lives.
History teaches that when the labor force became commoditized in the mid 1800's - it blew up the plans of the plantation systems to leverage industrial technology to expand their plantations for unlimited growth and profit. The consequence was the most bloody war in human history - the US civil war. It was considered the most bloody in human history because they were just beginning to figure out how to use these new technologies to kill people, but hadn't developed any adequete defences yet.
The point is that a similar problem will happen when patents become commoditized, and when those who wish to impose patent controlls resort to coercion to impose them. People don't seem to understand that patents by their very nature are violent and genocidial and could easially lead to the ruthless murder of billions as manufacturing becomes commoditized. In fact, their track record today isn't too impressive: eg, how safety devices in autos were held back 20 years because of patents, and how millions Africans died needlseely of AIDS because people tried to forbid them from making generics by suing in the world court. These are just some in a long list of exanples that have caused millions to die or suffer needlessly, right now most of the ruin is not obvious to us - but it certainly will eventually become so.
To sustain this business model, this company is going to have to make sure nobody closes the huge loopholes in patent law on which they depend. So they're going to need to spend a lot of money on lobbying, and especially on the usual astroturfing and fake-think-tank PR firms. Here's a suggestion. Don't go around hiring the same old ones, because everybody knows they're fake. Especially don't hire the ones that have been outed by the tobacco lawsuits. Instead, start your own. How much can a dozen fake grassroots organizations cost? Seems like each one will only need about one employee, so you can have the whole dozen for well under $2 million a year. And here's another suggestion: set them to work doing plausible campaigns for whatever their ostensible purpose is, then they'll look more credible when they go to work on your issue. That way they won't come out looking like Americans for Tax Reform -- you have to look hard to find those Americans reforming any tax other than the tobacco tax.
I think the idea probably isn't so much to charge royalties or make money via litigation as to have a tempting body of IP to exchange with other companies who agree to cross-license their IP to all members in the Myrvold keiretsu. If the IP stockpile grows large enough, members could have a huge advantage over non-members. Kind of like an open-source club that's only open to members and that charges massive dues. Of course, membership is a double-edged sword, since your cohort are now also your direct competitors against which you have no IP shield. So it'd make sense for everyone in the keiretsu to buy ownership of each other. Maybe pool shares into a keiretsu mutual fund as a condition of membership?