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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.
huh? Where have you been for the last 100 years dude? Yes, this is a good example of why the patent system is broken.. but its been that way for quite a while now.
How we know is more important than what we know.
While this shit may sound good for some of you, I recently began doing research on a project to build water transportation using alternative energy.
Well guess what? One guy ownes ALL rights to the most common sense approaches, yet refuses to bring his product to market. Prior to my investigation, all my 'original' ideas have already been thought of , registered, and accepted. The only way I could move forward would be to pay someone who didn't do anything to help my work some money for every sale. That is, if he'd even respond to inquiries.
It gave me an edge for the future. If the system is going to be bound by such things, I am going to register every stupid thing I come across that hasn't been registered yet. If I can't invent without being stifled, why should anyone else?
"So how are they making their money? By litigation. So they're not actually helping progress, they're hindering it."
evidence to this light is found here: http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/348
a company by the name of thorium power, is designing a real thorium based fuel that would run in a conventional Russian atomic reactor, and along comes this patent troll company trying to eat up the US thorium reactor patents... which will mean Russia and China may be using thorium reactors while America finds itself unable to because 'the patent troll drove the cost too high'
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html