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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.
First of all, the article goes on and on about brainstorming... which is universally known to be a really bad way to come up with ideas. If you have an idea and you want to flesh out what it is good for or, better yet, what it is not good for, then brainstorming is great way to do it, but inspiration does not come from brainstorming - it comes in the shower or when you're walking the dog or whatever.
Then there's this whole "ideas have value" thing. Their whole business model is based on that tenant. Which is why they're not actually selling these patents to anyone, no-one goes out looking for a great idea to pour money into and create a business from.. investors go looking for *people* who have both a great idea and the technical skills to turn it into a workable business.. you can't just pick up someone else's idea and run with it, no matter how well the patent is written, and there's never written well. So how are they making their money? By litigation. So they're not actually helping progress, they're hindering it.
All in all, its a dot com era idea for a business.. "let's get smart people together and invent stuff" and leave all the pesky marketing and sales to someone else.. but that's what business *is*, so you're basically saying you want to be in the business of not being in business.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Developing ideas? Give me a break, they buy patents and sell licenses. It's your basic patent troll outfit.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
I always thought that a working model was required in order to patent a 'thing'. How can they possibly know that it will work or what other patents are required in order to impliment said patent if all they did was to sit around a table and discuss ideas found in other papers?
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Personally, I think you give these guys too much credit. Pimps are the epitome of coolness. Fancy, flamboyant suits, canes, and ostentatious jewelry are great. Plus, pimps are cultural hearths. The language of my generation was pretty much developed entirely by pimps and their siblings, "playas". These guys the article is talking about are more like the white cracker, slavemasters of ideas. In short, they are totally not cool.
I got a catholic block.
I saw a post on the blog Technology Liberation Front that pointed out that most of their ideas don't pan out. They just don't even work. You know what many of those "inventors" sound like?
The same sort of person who would fit in well with "social scientists." It's great that you are smart and have ideas, but I could give a shit less about your "ideas" if you cannot make a functioning prototype of them.
Our society should have precious little tolerance for people who only come up with ideas on paper, without being able to put them into practice.
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?
I was going to jump in and describe this company as being a bunch of parasitic patent trolls, who create zero value for the world, but instead suck value from people doing REAL work.
But it looks like plenty of people have already made that point. Excellent!
These people should not be glamorized, they should be roundly criticized for being lowlife parasites.
But since the patent office will now take "patents" on "a system for ..." that pretty much means that anyone can patent anything and then wait for someone to actually invent the device.
... and then claim that a new battery system infringes upon my useless patent. As long as I'm willing to "license" my patent for less than an actual court case would cost, I'll make money.
I can patent a perpetual motion machine
And I'll hinder REAL innovation and progress.
That's the goal with that company. They aren't improving anything. They're abusing the patent system (with the patent system's willing support) to drain profits from real inventors.
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.
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=168820&cid=14072468
Bottom line, patents are anti free-market, they are not property, they are not incentive, they are not protection. Rather brought to their logical conclusion they are genocidal.
That's the problem with these types - they do the 2% inspiration, but skip the 98% perspiration. If somebody else does the 98%, they sue.
So much for "promoting science and the useful arts..." - ergo, IMHO, unconstitutional.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The whole concept of patents is so 1900ish. There was a time when people could create something and then keep it under wraps, and nobody could discover what they were doing under the hood. Mostly because mostly people with the knowledge were not near the devices.
This allowed a lot of ideas to get lost. Patents were specifically designed to prevent this act. But now in 2000 and the internet this idea is totally useless. There will be always people who can reverse engineer to find out how the thing works. So that particular reason for Patents is patently lost.
Now there is another use of patents to allow people to invest into projects that have a very high risk value. Pharmaceutical companies do have these kinds of projects. I would think there is some use of patents for these sort of companies.
But for the rest of the market Patents are an abomination. They should be abolished. Software industry definitely does not need patents. They already can use copyrights, to control their creations.
One thing that the patent office should do is to require a working prototype. No prototype no patent. And the complete plan should be made open.