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Top Microsoft Execs Moonlighting For a Patent Bully
theodp writes "TechFlash reports that Microsoft bigwigs like Craig Mundie and Bill Gates (when he still worked there) have been secretly moonlighting at Intellectual Ventures (IV), the 'patent extortion fund' run by Bill's pal Nathan Myhrvold. A Microsoft spokesman confirmed that its technologists have been sitting in on IV-sponsored 'innovation sessions,' where their pearls of wisdom were captured and turned into patent applications for Searete, an IV shadow corporate entity. And if all goes well, Searete will soon enjoy exclusive rights to the fruit of the brainstorming, which includes processes ranging from determining and rewarding 'influencers' to treating malaria, HIV, TB, hepatitis, smallpox, and cancer."
If I were a Microsoft investor I might be a little bit annoyed by high ranking employees contributing valuable IP to another company.
Microsoft is not doing its job as looking after its investors interests if it does not pursue the employees involved for this.
It doesn't surprise me that smart, greed oriented, affluent people will make use of their talent for some extra money, at whatever the cost to the public (who are largely now all have-nots).
But what happens when pressure exceeds tolerance? When the have-nots have had the last straw? We throw down the yoke and fight for what is ours, which is that right to evolve, either technologically or financially without interruption from outside constraints.
This is a sticky situation with patents. Patents are really only relevant if you are intending to profit from your invention, which is why I like Open Source. If something is released to the public freely, and is allowed to grow and expand on its own merit, no patent can stop it. If no money is gained, no patent holder can sue for money gained. No patent holder can sue to prevent Open Source, because their act of downloading the software to examine it constitutes agreement with the license.
Even worse case scenario, if some asshat managed to convince a judge that their patent was valid and that an Open Source project was in violation, there really is no recourse.
Now if you find that after years of extensive work, that some asshat is suing you for patent violation, you can contact the EFF and fight it. They will help.
With all the ideas floating around, it only goes so far that someone would argue they had an original thought. I mean that really is a tough sell to any judge. Good luck with that.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
by giving them free meds, and then charging
them via patent royalties ?
I gotta hand it to you, Mr. Gates... Tell everyone you retired from Microsoft so you could free up time to monopolize biotech and a dozen other infrastructure-critical industries in this country... That's pretty clever. Seriously, are you mad because nobody invited you to prom? Is this some kind of Stepford Wives remix? I'm not saying this because I'm trying to be funny or sarcastic (well, mostly not sarcastic)... I really want to know why some people feel a compulsive need to consume or control every resource in the world. These people are like viruses... An ideological cancer, and it's disgusting to watch people who scream "But... MY INNOVATION!!! NOoooooooo!" Whenever someone asks why they're holding all the cards, but once they've got 'em, boy, outsource everything to a bunch of people who still use their hand to wipe their asses with, reduce the research budget to zilch, and then call yourselves innovators. Innovators of what... Slavery? Mass exploitation? Please. Have some originality... Try doing good for a change. If nothing else, it'll confuse the hell out of your detractors.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
There was a long article in some magazine (Harper's? Atlantic? Can't remember...) many months ago, explaining the whole situation. It sounded really cool, actually. That'd be a neat place to hang out for a while.
Haida Manga
The New Yorker had an article about this six months ago.
Ridiculously off topic, but I am not sure which is scarier, your UID or that Sig. (Where's it from?)
P.S. Mod him up.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
This isn't the first time they've done IP trolling.
My blog
Nobel laureate and Physics Professor Robert B. Laughlin discussed the impact of knowledge increasingly being sequestering from the public. While a certain amount of information is kept secret for legitimate military or security purposes (such as how to build an atomic bomb), more and more knowledge is being restricted for economic reasons, he explained. Many companies (and people) consider ideas to be their intellectual property.
http://www.amazon.com/Crime-Reason-Closing-Scientific-Mind/dp/0465005071
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
I think its important to understand that as society enters into the coming replication age, that the phony property right they call "patent" will become genocidal.
As things like nanotech and 3d printing take off, production will shift away from the factory and back into the home. The market will start to center around production and creation services instead of production goods.
The people and industries on the losing side of this model will almost certainly try to turn to a patent royalty model, and will almost certainly use extremely coercive measures to impose their control. Just look at Monsanto and ADM and their heavy handed patent strategies used against farmers. Just look at the RIAA and how they cling to their royalty control model under the guise of "intellectual" property and attacked everyone. Just look at the slave plantations, how the plantation masters envisioned that the future of the industrial revolution was to leverage inventions like the cotton-gin and their "ownership" of slaves to vastly expand the size and production capabilities of their plantations. Just look at how pharmaceutical companies sued African nations in the world court to ban them from buying generic AIDS drugs from India. Just look at how patents in the USA slowed anti-lock brakes and air-bags development by decades as millions died.
Mark my words, if we let them push the lie that patent is a "property" or an "incentive" or "protection", genocidal consequences will not be far away.
... if it wasn't for the fact that one of the two employees mentioned happens to be the single majority stockholder of Microsoft.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
This will be addressed in the next advertisement, as rumored all over the internet (starting here).
Jerry Seinfeld: "Bill -- what were you thinking?! You can't give away that secret to the OTHER GUY -- YOU GOTTA KEEP THAT FOR MSFT. What will the shareholders say?? They'll say that wasn't very fair of you, that what they'll say!"
Bill Gates: "They promised no one would find out."
Jerry Seinfeld: "This reminds me of when my Mom used to make me eat chicken soup. She'd say that it's an honest thing to eat chicken soup you paid for with your own money -- AND that's true, today, you know."
Bill Gates: "What?"
Jerry Seinfeld: "You gotta eat chicken soup, Bill. I know a guy who ... here is the spot right here, let's go inside and we can eat, but you gotta do it simple, Bill -- just hand over the money and say the name of the soup. But that's all you can do. So, you hold out your money, speak your soup in a loud, clear voice, step to the left and receive...It's very important not embellish on your order. No extraneous comments. No questions. No compliments."
Bill Gates: "Okay."
Soup Nazi: "YES."
Bill Gates: "Uh... what's good today?"
Soup Nazi: "WAT!"
Bill Gates: "What do you recommend for someone who is having a bad day?"
Soup Nazi: "WAT! THIS NO 20 QUESTIONS. NO SOUP FOR YOU!"
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
These guys think that they're helping... but the people who do the work (I'm thinking of some poor grad student in a lab somewhere) to make a working device go to the patent office and discover that they don't have rights to their own work. It's wonderful.
If you don't (or can't) use a patent, at least make it free. A couple hours "brainstorming" should not trump a few years of hard work.
Oh right, Microsoft isn't in the vaccine business.
So please explain why, apart from an intense desire to have your ass sued, would you "pursue" employees who are presumably meeting their obligations to MS?
Oh right, because you needed something to say because you posted so early.
the idea of ip law is to reward those who innovate. the supposition being, that were there no legal protection, innovators would see the fruits of their intellectual pursuits go to established financial entities instead of themselves
and it is therefore the greatest irony that ip law is now used to suppress true innovation and protect entrenched financial entities. only the rich can afford the legal bully pulpit that ip law enables
ip law needs to disappear
but at best, we can ignore it, and route around it, like the damage it is
death to ip law
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Malcolm Gladwell (of Tipping Point fame) write a glowing article about this venture.
Bill Gates, whose company, Microsoft, is one of the major investors in Intellectual Ventures, says, "I can give you fifty examples of ideas they've had where, if you take just one of them, you'd have a startup company right there."
--- http://davidnehme.blogspot.com
This the kind of innovation they are on about. Can any of these patents be turned into real working devices, without spending thousands of man-hours and huge wads of money. I'm thinking of the NTP v Blackberry litigation. NTP basically bought up some old wireless, paging and email patents, sat on them and them and then waited until Blackberry did all the work ...
'NTP is a holding company created in 1992 to manage certain patents belonging to Thomas Campana'
'on 20 May 1991. Campana filed a patent application for his idea to merge existing e-mail systems with radio-frequency wireless communication networks'
davecb5620@gmail.com
They could fix patent trolls like this in one swoop if they change the law to be use it or loose it. And if you loose it, it should be come open to the public for someone else to pick up and use ... for free. Think of the stimulus to the economy.
This kind of bullshit would stop if the patent office required working implementations again.
The hard part of most inventions is making them work, not having the original idea. Granting patents on ideas that haven't been implemented harms innovation because it discourages people from investing the money to make inventions work.
"The New Yorker had an article [newyorker.com] about this six months ago", m000
Did the article also mention that Bill Gates of Microsoft also has a financial interest in Searete?
davecb5620@gmail.com
Probably not, just a lucky bastard who wasn't in class or at work at the time.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
MS wouldn't do this for free. Myhrvold probably offered them some insanely great deal whereby MS benefits from the patent trolling and Myhrvold operates with the understanding that industry majors (MS, Apple, Sony, etc.) won't be on his back about it.
Myhrvold is going in the direction he sees most defensible and profitable: We're just following what the law says and protecting our ideas.
The way I see it, Myhrvold is going to launch the attack before the public at large start realizing how dangerous the concept of IP is.
It is interesting that Google are on board too, though.
Who says big ideas are rare?
I've got a funny feeling that we are about to see an unholy alliance between two corporate giants.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
George Lakoff: Women, Fire, & Dangerous Things; Case Study 1 on Anger:
(Physical events can be mapped to emotional distressing states.)
Source Metaphor: An explosion is damaging to the container and dangerous to bystanders.
Target Knowledge Metaphor: A loss of control of knowledge is damaging to a person and dangerous to other people.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Train Wrecks are caused by one train trying to enter the other from behind.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
So what you're trying to say is something like this:
ip law add route null
although for Gates it is no surprise.
More articles:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20081108/1744562771.shtml
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/10/gates_myhrvold_patents/print.html
http://www.patentfools.com/2008/09/intellectual-ventures-independence-day-take-ii/#more-19
http://www.techflash.com/microsoft/Gates_top_Microsoft_executives_do_some_inventing_on_the_side34192179.html
The purpose if Intellectual Ventures is to harass and intimidate Microsoft competitors, but to do so in a way that Microsoft can keep its hands clean.
Bill Gates and Paul Allen have contributed knowledge and expertise to many 'think tanks' for fee and for free. Why the secrecy here?
Microsoft is a ruthless competitor with a long history of dirty tricks. They didn't invent FUD (Check w/ IBM for that), but they are masters of FUD-foo.
Intellectual Ventures needs to have a large enough portfolio to bring pressure to bear where Microsoft wants that pressure applied. It does not matter to Microsoft that IV succeeds or fails in law suits, as long as Microsoft competitors can be harassed, intimidated and drained of funds.
All of this may be completely legal. Is it unethical? that depends on your ethics. For many people in the business world, if something is not illegal, then it is not unethical to do that something.
The good thing about current patent law is that they'll only put the US and Europe 20 years behind places that don't give a hoot about patent infringement. After that, the field's open.
In a way, this is a good thing -- if they patent *everything* right now, and 99% of those things don't get addressed for lack of technology or resources, until the patents have expired, then all those research directions are an open field, for anyone to explore. You could look at this as a retarded version of open source (where by retarded I mean both 'stupid' and 'slowed down', in this case, by 20 years.)
As long as they don't manage to lengthen the scope of patents, all they're doing is cutting their own throats.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Use it or loose it? Who would you loose it upon?
The ...er...thing... that the lead text referred to had a reference to smallpox (variola) deep inside it. A vaccine or vaccine delivery system, I believe. And don't tell me that I didn't read it. It was 'written' in a way that made it impossible to read sensibly. Look at it and tell me that I'm wrong.
Anyway, smallpox is supposed to be a dead disease. Vanquished from the earth through the work of the WHO and Dr. Lawrence Brilliant in the 1970s.
So, what's Bill and his Bozo boys talking about here? Do they know something that we don't?
What we do know is that the Soviets made millions of doses of smallpox from samples that were saved for 'research' purposes during the last paranoid days of their empire. The BioPreparat program that has been documented in the book 'The Devil in the Freezer'. All these doses were supposed to be destroyed.
It would be bad news if this disease were to reappear.
It's no surprise that Gates and company are primarily interested in thinking up general ideas, grabbing patents on them and then beating people over the head to pay them for the ideas. This has been Gates' MO since day one - pick the pockets of every single human being on the planet with a pocket. Gates is greedier than a member of the Russian-Jewish Mafia.
"Gary Flake, one of Microsoft's top Internet gurus" - there's an appropriate name for a Microsoft employee. They're all "flakes".
Microsoft basically is an organized crime group which has incorporated. Actually, one could say that about most large corporations.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
every pimply faced 13 year old has the same global reach and publishing potentiality of bertelsmann and time warner circa 1988
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This flies in the face of the Bill and Linda foundation. Perhaps the reasoning is to make it so the drug companies get trumped and then the drug patents will be made available to third world. God only knows Bill does not need the money! Yet.
This message was not sent from an iPhone because Peter Sellers really was a deviated prevert without a dime for the call
...to the new world order global elite aristocrats who, along with their brainwashed greenie "useful idiots", would like to reduce the world's populations of "useless eaters" "breeders" and "greedy energy consumers" down to only 10% of what it is now, with them being the exceptions of course. They would probably be delighted to have access to a smallpox vaccine that worked, and let everyone else just "get recycled back into the ecosystem".
Since they released Windows Live OneCare.
If enithin kan gow rong it whil. (Murfey)
THe reason is that Gates is building up ideas based on other ppl. By patenting them in a different company, they will be able to keep them quiet until the patent time.
What is interesting is that just last week I was suggesting that yahoo needed desperately to put out a call for ideas. Sadly, the only response was from a guy who thinks that an OSS fest is the same thing. It is not, and it is NOT what yahoo needs. Yahoo had good guys working there, but most have left. They DESPERATELY need new ideas that can be patented and controlled. But yahoo in general does not have that spark left. They need good outside blood. So, by holding a contest for ideas, combined with a means to not allow the idea to fall outside of the judges, would allow ppl that have interesting ideas to get them off the ground. Obviously, Yahoo would have to patent the ideas AND either hire the person (ppl?) or compensate them in some fashion.
But my guess is that companies like Yahoo (and others like Intuit and HP) will follow the same path as AOL and Digital Research.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The patent on 'Injectable controlled release fluid delivery system' sounds like an insulin pump. I'm sure if I looked I could find more examples.
The other patent sounds like its trying to patent advertising and statistics.
Of course when I read patents I generally quickly reach a point where I'm ready to start hanging lawyers. It would be nice if they made a law that said a patent had to be understood and approved by 2 seperate 2nd grade classes. The language currently used seems designed for ambiguity rather than clarity.
Absent someone keeping an eye on people's actions elsewhere, how do you protect "IP"? If it is RP then you can have guards there and you can SEE people using your land/house/car/etc. Y'know, your Real Property.
Your real property is worn out each time it gets used. Your IP doesn't.
A 10 year old could work it out.
Then again, they don't demand to be paid for fairy tales.
A corporation can find a patent of theirs you're possibly, under some readings of the patent, infringing on. You cannot produce until this is cleared and you only have outgoings because you're a startup with this one product. However, the big company has other lines they can manage to get income from.
So the startup goes out, the company buys the patent at auction and the patents have had the same effect as you attribute to the "use it or lose it" idea.
When it comes to selling the idea to someone who has the wherewithal to make it when you don't, US AN NDA!!! These work BETTER than patents. They don't expire. EVER.
is that a lot of tech companies will go belly up shortly and their patents will be up for auction in fire sales... My problem with patents is that they are treated like property and can be bought and sold... Things would be a lot easier if the patent died when the company/person that took it out went bust/died or were non-transferable when companies got bought out...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
In order to get one of the greatest inventions of the modern age, in other words, we thought we needed the solitary genius. But if Alexander Graham Bell had fallen into the Grand River and drowned that day back in Brantford, the world would still have had the telephone, the only difference being that the telephone company would have been nicknamed Ma Gray, not Ma Bell.
If that's the case, Mr. Gladwell, then why do we need a patent system to incent inventors at all? It sounds like we would see just as much innovation without the much vaunted protection that is the foundation of a company like IV.
In fact, one of the IV ideas for a blood filter to prevent cancer was already in progress by another company. Well, why should that slow IV down for a millisecond? If good ideas are "in the air" as the article seems to propose, then the only thing we might need to protect is the direct manifestation of such ideas. If scarcity of genius is a myth then genius is not in need of protection.
Gladwell's article basically says "we don't need to patent system."
I will have to read some of George Lakoff's stuff now. Thanks for the info, and its strangely related to my sig... which was unintended yet still very fascinating to me.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.