Intellectual Ventures' Patent Protection Racket

David Gerard writes "Nathan Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures doesn't sue people over patents, because that would be patent trolling! No, instead they just threaten to sell the patent to a known litigious patent troll. So that's all right then. Timothy Lee details how using patents to crush profitable innovation works in practice, and concludes: 'In thinking about how to reform the patent system, a good yardstick would be to look for policy changes that would tend to put Myhrvold and his firm out of business.'"

Comments

Re:Please leave sarcasm out of summaries

[David Gerard]

I wrote that text and it was passed unaltered, so blame me for the pissed-off tone.

Re:All talk...

[scamper_22]

The order of importance:

Government workers > Lawyers > corporations > citizens

Re:Shorter lifetime?

[RingDev]

Which is still a poor point, as per your own example, 22+ years expired between the creation and the popularization of the invention. Even under modern patent law with a 20 year monopoly, the patent STILL would have expired before the could recoup the R&D costs.

The purpose of IP isn't to secure the long term viability of corporations, it is to give a short term market advantage to invetors in exchange for the knowledge to become part of the public domain. The goal at the end of the day is to increase the size of the public domain, not the pocket book.

-Rick

Re:All talk...

[russotto]

Never, because all the "discussion" is being done in a gigantic echo chamber that makes it get louder and louder, with no dissenting voices

Plenty of dissenting voices. But since they've either got to defend ridiculous patents by claiming they're not ridiculous (often by insulting anyone who claims the patents are obvious extensions of existing technology), or claim the ridiculous ones are an aberration (which flies in the face of the evidence), they don't have much credibility.

Patents were never meant to cover the raw output of brainstorming sessions. Just about any patent obtained that way is going to be non-novel, obvious, non-disclosive, or some combination of the three. But since the patent office approves them anyway, they form a barrier to getting things accomplished.

This is exactly the sort of thing Justice Bradley was referring to when he wrote:

"It creates a class of speculative schemers who make it their business to watch the advancing wave of improvement, and gather its foam in the form of patented monopolies, which enable them to lay a heavy tax upon the industry of the country, without contributing anything to the real advancement of the arts. It embarrasses the honest pursuit of business with fears and apprehensions of concealed liens and unknown
liabilities lawsuits and vexatious accountings for profits made in good faith." (Atlantic Works v. Brady, 1017 U.S. 192, 200 (1882)).

The supreme court is reviewing swpats October 2nd!

[H4x0r Jim Duggan]

    The Supreme Court's review of Bilski is the first time since 1981 that they've decided to look at the patentability of software. The Supreme Court needs facts, studies, and opinions (but only if they're
from very respected people, which includes Timothy B. Lee). You can help gather and document these things on the public swpat.org wiki:

• Studies
• Arguments
• âZTimothy B. Lee on software patents

This is our big chance to fix the problem!