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Beware the King of the Patent Trolls
superapecommando writes "If you haven't heard of Intellectual Ventures, you may want to check this out. Set up by ex-Microsoftie Nathan Myhrvold, with investments from Microsoft among others, it is basically a patenting machine – filing and buying them in huge quantities. Note that it doesn't actually use these patents – except to threaten people with. In other words, Intellectual Ventures is a patent troll – or, rather the King of the Patent Trolls. So I was interested to come across this extremely positive blog post on the company. That it is so positive is hardly surprising, since the blog is called 'Tangible IP,' and subtitled 'ipVA's blog on adding value through intellectual property.' Nonetheless, it provides valuable insights into the mindset of fans of intellectual monopolies. Here's what it says about Intellectual Ventures: 'They are an invention house, and have adopted and reinvented leading edge patent strategies to create a portfolio of their own IP which, in its own, would be of high high worth.' They don't invent anything in the proper, deep sense of the word; they merely file and buy patents – with no intent of ever making stuff or solving real-life problems."
Excellent first sentence, really gets that article off to an awesome start.
If you haven't heard of Intellectual Ventures, you will do.
Is that some sort of threat?
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Someone invented something which otherwise would not have existed, and in return they got paid money in a chain of payments which ended up with this company. That's how capitalism works - the free trade of commodities.
The problem lies with the original inventor, if you want: the guy who wanted to be paid for an idea, rather than giving it to the public domain. How many good ideas have you given to the public domain, reader?
Moreover, Intellectual Property is one of the last assets the United States has left to profit from. We don't actually make much anymore, we just invent it and have someone else make it. If we don't control the profits from the inventing, we're fucked.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Information economy only works if you have mega army to enforce it.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
The problem lies with profit, man. It's evil to want to be paid. In the new reality, right-thinking people give away everything.
"If you haven't heard of Intellectual Ventures, you will do.
That was the first line of the summary. Really, can't slashdot get an editor? Or even someone with journalism experience who would know to read something over before putting it on the front page? This story could not possibly have been so time-sensitive that it needed to bypass some common sense editing.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Welcome to the best side of capitalism ....why work when you can steal idea from inventor ? ....
Their Wikipedia entry implies that they actually do a decent bit of R&D themselves. I wouldn't call a company that does R&D and licenses the heck out of its work "King of the Patent Trolls." Of course, that assumes that the Wikipedia entry is accurate and all that. I can handle a company making money off of pure R&D. What I cannot tolerate is a company that makes money off of patents that it bought from someone else when it has neither a R&D base nor a manufacturing base.
" with no intent of ever making stuff "
That is not, nor has it ever been, the point of patents.
You could argue they do deserve the patent because they never intend to license, and thus is against the intent of the constitutionality of patents. However event that would be weak since congress determines patent laws.
What they do is well within the patent concept.
However, if you are talking about software or business methods, then those are clearly outside the intent of patents.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I don't know if anyone else around here remembers the state of slate/pen computing in the mid-to-late 90s, but there used to be a company called "General Magic" that made a touch-based graphical operating system for handhelds named "Magic Cap".
As the company kinda fell apart, there was an effort by some of the developers to open source it. But their intellectual property had been sold to Intellectual Ventures, because of some agent technology their stuff included. (Basically, imagine setting up a search on the handheld, and then briefly connecting to the internet to let your "search agent" run around inside a cloud, analyzing data and performing calculations. Then you reconnect and your agent comes back to you and presents the stuff on your handheld.)
Intellectual Ventures never really wanted most of the Magic Cap stuff. But they've made it so difficult to disentangle that the developers eventually gave up. Here's a writeup from one of the people involved.
http://joshcarter.com/magic_cap/faqs/the_future_of_magic_cap
General Magic made a graphical OS designed for handheld touch-based use, not based on a port of a desktop OS. And the people who built it tried to open-soruce it, but were blocked by Intellectual Ventures. If things had worked out differently, we might have had some really interesting work going on in the slate area long before the advent of the iPad.
(Heck. I'd love to run MagicCap on an iPad. It's the perfect hardware platform for it. I have three MagicCap devices myself.)
Yet another reason to completely scrap the patent process as the original intent of patents has been completely corrupted by lawyers.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/againstfinal.htm
And, and a tip of my hat to Microsoft "innovation".
Please help document there here:
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Intellectual_Ventures
en.swpat.org is a way to build a wealth of info for when we need it.
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
If I had any mod points, I'd certainly mod you in some direction, that's true.
Posting as an AC for a reason.
What more need I say?
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
It's a legitimate issue in the technology sector. All we keep hearing from political pundits and professors in the classroom is that innovation will drive the economy, lead you out of your bankrupt and unemployed community, solve world hunger and cure cancer.
And yet the patent system is structured in such a way that encourages this sort of corporate behavior, culminating in companies like Intellectual Ventures who, given that they don't produce anything per se, exist almost exclusively to stifle innovation. And they're making a truckload of profit in doing so.
Yes, there are certainly other issues that still need working out - can software really be patented, is something intangible really able to belong to someone, should monopolies be regulated, WHEN IS THE US PATENT OFFICE GETTING THEIR ACT TOGETHER (sorry, fingers slipped there), and countless others. But this would appear to be the poster child for everything that's wrong with the current patent system.
"I'd just like to emphasise that taking a million years isn't a metaphor here..." -Rich Bradshaw
I will hear have not of these trolling patents are, and I resent have maybe the implication that I will do!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Instead of clicking through to the patent blog, here's the economist article that started the debate.
meep
Can someone explain this stuff to me? Can you really patent ideas for things? Like, can I patent "A method of energy production whereby isotopes of hydrogen and helium are fused to release heat" without ever working out the details? If so, where's the monetary incentive to make ideas work?
Whenever a capitalist talks about "adding value" or "creating wealth", they're really talking about creating scarcity. "Intellectual property" is the purest form of artificial scarcity, restricting the use of ideas, which otherwise can travel freely from mind to mind with negligible actual cost. A more mundane example is the way building houses drives up the cost of property by reducing the pool of available (or at least desirable) undeveloped property. (The housing bubble pushed this past the point of viability by building more houses than there were buyers for, but between inevitable population growth and the physical decline of abandoned houses, the situation will eventually return to normal.)
We end up with deceptive terms like "creating wealth" because few people would be enthusiastic about creating scarcity except, of course, for the people who already own the commodity being made scarce. Everyone else just ends up paying more for less. Intellectual property is particularly egregious in this sense because the scarcity is completely artificial, as opposed to real estate, where there really is a limited supply of raw material. Ideas, even good ones, are cheap and plentiful and very seldom actually unique; "ownership" is rather arbitrarily awarded to the company that has the resources to afford the patent process and gets it through the door first, with a strong incentive to do so as vaguely and broadly as possible so as to throttle as much actual creativity as possible.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
If anyone would like to read a somewhat middle-of-the-road (neither "IV IS GREAT!" nor "IP is the DEVIL!") discussion of Intellectual Ventures, The New Yorker did a somewhat in-depth article on them last year that I thought was interesting. I (being of the IP is the DEVIL! mindset) don't think he addressed the problems to society at large with having companies that primarily chew up intellectual advancement space by pre-emptive patenting. But, on the other hand, patents are time-limited, and if they patent lots and lots of stuff that just isn't feasible given current tech, in 20 years when it IS feasible, there will be prior art and the areas won't be patentable, so that could be a plus.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
"with no intent of ever making stuff or solving real-life problems" which is exactly what MicroSLOP does.
Yours In Akademgorodok,
Kilgore Trout.
What if you could only own a patent if you manufactured something that used it? That would mean old unused patents would become public domain once they weren't needed (as determined by the market - if nobody was buying things that used it, and nobody made anything that used it, then the inventor could not hold the patent) Similarly, it means no one could buy a patent unless they were actively using it. It would remain with the original owner, or revert to the public domain if they went out of business.
I guess you might need protections then, to keep companies from just destroying another company to force the patents into the public domain. That could get sticky.
Could we do this with copyrights too? Ex: If you stop selling a book or piece of music, or stop selling a piece of software, it becomes public domain. That would help a lot with old video games. Hmm... what about art, where the artist doesn't want to make copies. Hmm....
Thoughts anyone?
They *paid* money to someone for their invention. Someone, supposedly,
figured out something interesting, and, for whatever reason, decided
to take his money and run rather than let the invention stagnate.
Now, I don't like it when the patents are not for anything interesting
or novel, but simply being a patent troll is not a bad thing. Being a patent
troll of "obvious stupid" patents does seem like a bad thing
and is more of a fault of the people who *granted* the patent
to begin with.
they're buying ideas & patents. Shouldn't we sell them ideas and patents - lots and lots of them?
That's what the market says.
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I don’t know how it is in the US, but in Germany, if you don’t actually use a patent, then after a specific time, your patent automatically becomes void.
This is to stop people who aren’t serious about doing something with it. Because then, the original point of the patent goes away.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/eco_exp_pergdp-economy-exports-per-gdp
Scroll down - we're between Burundi and Cape Verde, at number 179.
Does the richest country in the world have the most manufacturing? Yep. Are they in the top ten in manufacturing per capita? Nope. Are they even in the top fifty for manufacturing per GDP? Nope.
These numbers are by "value added" manufacturing. So, we've got a lot of bullshit that we put together that's manufactured almost entirely in east asia. Gluing it together, shoving it in a box, and then raising the price is not what I would call manufacturing.
http://hbr.org/2010/03/the-big-idea-funding-eureka/ar/1
Apart from the obvious anti-patent bias of your post (IV != SCO), I think you are conflating invention with manufacture.
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If you let everyone copy, nobody does any R&D
Ah, but this is not even remotely certain. Actually, several economic papers give documented facts about how patents actually discourage innovation. (I remember that one of them was linked to in a recent discussion, but I don't have the time to search now)
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I'd like to see patents have two protection periods. A short period if you don't productize the patent and a longer life if you do. This would force companies to either license, productize or lose patents and may actually mean better products get to market faster.
I've written multiple patent applications for IV and can testify that subject matter of most applications have extensive merit. I've written 2 apps from inventors' doctorate thesis. There were a bitch to write. I can't go into details obviously but, if you're interested, do a search on IV patents in uspto, and read up their content. And, don't believe everything you read in slashdot.
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The book mentioned is copyrighted:
© Michele Bouldrin and Daniel K. Levine 2008.
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exemption and the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.
Nathan Myhrvold is a friend of Bill Gates. They wrote a book together, The Road Ahead.
It seems to me that abusiveness is their business. They feel they have to be against something to make money. They scrupulously avoid doing something positive.
The book was an example of that. It was amazing. It seemed as though several editors went through the book carefully and removed any information that might be of interest. I say that because I don't think anyone could write a rough draft of such a long book that was entirely free of anything useful.
Intellectual Ventures is the parent of TerraPower, which we discussed here on /. a few days ago. You may recall: Bill Gates May Build Small Nuclear Reactor.
Just because you never make anything and don't ever solve a real world problem doesn't mean you didn't invent something. If I design something that does something in a new way or does something not done before I have invented something. Even if I take that design and lock it away in a draw for all time, I still invented it. You might not like thier business model, you might not like what they do to IP, but to say the never invented anything just because they don't make anything is a pretty narrow view of invention yourself.
I haven't crossed paths (yet) with IV, but I do believe that they are fundamentally evil. They're a natural consequence of bad laws and legal practice.
They like to describe their model as "Hey, Mr. Inventor, we'll buy your patents, or help you patent your stuff, and even pay you to work on it". This approach is appealing in principle, and to be sure, it does put some money in the hands of those inventors.
The problem is that what the Patent Office treats as an "invention" is almost completely unrelated to what constitutes an "invention" in the real world of commerce. A patent-office invention is just an idea. It doesn't have to be manufacturable, it doesn't have to be a viable product, it even doesn't have to work. It just has to be interesting and complicated enough that a relatively unskilled patent examiner cannot find a good reason to deny a patent. And since the examiner has only limited time (small number of hours) to examine each invention, and he's goaled on patents issued, not denied, well, pretty much anything can be patented.
(When I refer to examiners as "relatively unskilled", I don't mean that they're dummies--but rather, that they are generally less practiced in the art of patent management than the high-powered patent attorneys who craft the applications they're reading. Indeed, an awful lot of good examiners end up turning into those high-paid attorneys, after taking a few yeas of "training" at the Patent Office.)
A real-world invention, on the other hand, has to be something that makes money. It has to work. It has to be manufacturable. It has to be sufficiently well-developed as a product that people want to buy it. And getting to there from the idea stage requires real resources: money to pay engineers, money to advertise and market, etc. And ultimately, of course, a real-world invention has to make a profit: the costs ought not to exceed the revenues.
So what IV is mostly doing is creating or buying patent-office inventions and using those to extract money from entrepreneurs and companies that are trying to create real-world inventions. They're a tax on the real resources that are required to turn an invention into a product, and in that role, they far more often prevent useful products from reaching the market, by increasing their development costs too much for a profitable result. Sure, there are a few poster-child inventions where IV has invested their own resources, or where someone else's profit is feasible even at IV's royalty rates, but those cases are rare--and exist for press releases.
IV's costs are minimal, because they mostly just get smart people together to brainstorm. The ideas are copied down by patent attorneys, turned into applications by IV's legal team, and pushed through the Patent Office. Once issued, a patent is presumptively valid, and fighting it is a crapshoot. So if IV comes to you, you either license or fold, because they have more and better lawyers. They generally do nothing to turn an IV patent into a real-world invention, and they bear none of those real costs.
It is a brilliant business model. At minimal costs, IV exploits a fundamental and likely unfixable problem with the patent process, namely that most modern inventions are too sophisticated, complex, and interrelated for the process to address--yet the government guarantees a monopoly, so you have to play within the system, or be subject to patent litigation that is completely unpredictable (except for its multi-million dollar cost). The patent "reform" proposals floating around just nibble at the edges; the system itself is fundamentally broken.
Slashdot editors are Americans. The people who are supposed to edit stories speak the American dialect. So what is your point exactly? That because there are people in the world for who English is not the first language it is okay for a person for who it is, to suck at it?
By that logic, a doctor doesn't have to know medicine since lots of people don't know medicine.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
People do, it's called licensing.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
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Look at our standard of living in the U.S. How did it get so high?
By blatently ignoring all the european and british patents and copyrights 100 years ago :-)
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Owning patents is a very lucrative business beyond merely patent trolling. I've worked with a number of clients who own a bunch of patents, ranging from a handful up to a few hundred. They're routinely traded, sold or licensed. Sometimes I'm left with the impression that it's like trading Pokemon or baseball cards. Its basically trading in information. In one particular case the patents all fall under a range of related of technologies and services which the company is actively developing. In other cases it seems like investors pick and choose patents they consider to have potential and develop the technology to a point where it can be sold off for a hefty sum to another company.
To be honest, I'm not sure how I feel about it. In many of these cases they end up doing something with the patents but there's something about this that leaves me with the impression that it's violating the spirit and intent of the patent system. But one thing is certain, we're unlikely to see any substantial and profound changes in the patent system because too many people have too much to gain from the system in its current form. And I think one of the underlying problems here is the litigious nature of this country. Perhaps we need a loser-pays system introduced?
So you're basically saying, "Don't hate the playa, hate the game". I agree.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Here's a link to the Federal Reserve report: http://www.federalreserve.gov/Releases/g17/Current/table9.htm.
In determining the true value of manufacturing operations to various national economies, information like that contained in this report are problematic. The statistic reported is gross value of manufactured goods. My company mfgs network security products. A Taiwanese firm, with facilities in China, manufactures our circuit boards. Our power supplies are manufactured by a Chinese firm. And so on. The total value of our finished product includes the value of our 'input materials', which are rather complex bits of manufactured product in their own right. In other words, the manufacturing value of my company's output *counts again* portions of the manufacturing value of those companies supplying input materials to us. For this reason, the total gross value of a nation's manufacturing output cannot by extension be assumed to correlate meaningfully to the value of that nation's economy.
I think a more reasonable way to judge the manufacturing value to a national economy would be to look at it from a supply chain perspective and only count that portion of a finished good's value attributable to process operations performed within that nation. The same strategy could be applied on a per-company basis as well. The problem, of course, is that this information would be difficult and expensive to collect, so it is not used as a metric.
Actually universal health care IS socialist. It's still a good thing.
Patent reform is coming, and it's scumbags like Myhrvold that are hastening its arrival.
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The patent system have value to society. In this particular case, a negative one. We are advancing and improving too fast and need something that slow the entire civilization down, and with a bit of luck, take us several steps backward, and this kind of patent trolls are one of the best tools for that thing.
Or at least work as a perfect case study to show to even the dumbest (honest) bonehead in governments that there is something very wrong in the system around this.
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The accountants don't explain it, shareholders don't ask about it, most business leaders don't understand it.
Amazingly though almost nobody outside of the IP community...
Ask people who know anything and they'd say that if IV breathes in your direction, take a license.
Emperror's clothes are awesome aren't they?
What is believed though is that this number puts them in the Premier league (up there with IBM, Nokia, Qualcomm and others) in terms of IP influence.
The same way Enron was at the top of their game?
Some say they have 30,000 patent families, but it is impossible to know exactly how many.
Bet you can't.
But they don't want to see seen to be litigators...that's bad for reputation so they outsource that part to others who aren't so bothered about what the outside world thinks of them.
You mean like the guy from Buffalo who keeps calling, threatening to sue me for an old debt? The same guy who for the sake of his own life can't tell me what the dept was for, who bought it, whose behalf he is suing me on or why he isn't instead suing the guy who had my phone number 8 years ago and incurred the actual debt, but dammit, he is going to find truth and justice just as soon as I write him a check for whatever sum he can squeeze out of me? Yeah, I wouldn't want that guy's reputation either.
Still, I'll give him credit, he filled out a page without resorting to righteous indignation.
Interval Research
Started by a different ex-microsoft guy. Hired tons of smart people. Paranoid secretive culture. Never sold a single product. Blew like a billion or two in the process. This smells like the same hubris.
If they haven't, then their patents may not be valid.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
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Suppose I cut down a tree. I can sell the log, or else I can mill the logs, turn them into wood, build something with the wood, and sell it as furniture.
Each of those steps "adds value" because there is profit to be made at each step.
Similarly, if I suck up oil from the ground I can sell the raw crude, or I can refine it and sell various types of distillates for significantly more money. More value added.
I agree that there are problems with the current intellectual property system...but to claim that all forms of value add are due to scarcity is just wrong.
The main requirement for entering this business--inventing things--is a complete lack of a soul (or conscience, if you'd rather).
It is pure greed and power mongering the way things stand and in the end the result is LESS innovation.
When I was 20, I used to do Q/A for a company that made lancets (a device to prick the skin to draw a drop of blood for analysis, usually blood sugar levels). One day I realized that there was a better way. The device I was inspecting daily had over 30 parts and ended up costing the retail customer around $35. They still had to purchase disposable tips that were one-use only and had to be safely discarded so as not to infect others.
In less then a week I had a flawlessly-working prototype of a disposable, single-use device that not only was sterile (didn't rely on packaging to achieve), but also cost less then $.10 to make and had ONE moving part (for a total of three parts in its entirety) and was completely safe to simply throw away (the needle that did the actual pricking was drawn back inside the case after it did it's thing), making it particularly attractive to hospitals.
I tried to shop the idea to my employer who seemed totally unimpressed and never brought it up again. I then tried to shop it to Becton-Dickenson (the worlds largest maker of syringes) and was pretty much told they didn't accept submissions from outside their own R/D dept.
A few months ago my mother hands me one. The device I designed. It turns out the doctor she saw that day had used it on her and she decided to keep it and show it to me. It was essentially my design with the sterility factor removed. They relied on the packaging to keep the device sterile until used.
After some research, it turns out that not only did my ex-employer have his name on the patent for it, but also the guy I spoke to on the phone at Becton-Dickinson. They had somehow both found out the other knew about the idea, waited 7 years to patent (since I did not patent it in that time) then simply co-submitted the patent, then went into production. They sell it to this day.
In short, they could have written me a check for $5k (I was hurting for tuition back then and could REALLY have used it), had full rights to the idea and not had to wait 7 years. Instead, they CHOSE to simply fuck me over. Nice guys.
Now, I ask you slash-dotters, what fucking incentive do I have to EVER bother trying my hand at inventing again? The knowledge that my idea at least made it to people that can use it?
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The iPhone itself is a real good (not an imaginary one). In his example, he said that creating patents (which are restrictions on what other people can build--you know, government granted monopolies on devices embodying the patented idea) does not add value. This is true. They create more restrictions. The people who add value have to license those patents (or avoid actually adding value in any way that infringes upon the patent claims).
There ARE ways to add value, but they involve using IP, not creating it. That's why we have IP laws, to expand the pool available for use. But these laws have an enforcement cost and behavior, like that of many companies, causes some of us to think that the enforcement costs outweigh the value added, particularly with all the crazy extensions people have added with the goal of rent-seeking.
My biggest problem with IP is that at some point, the lawmakers decided that profit was more important (and easier to measure) than innovation, and so they changed the laws to make IP more profitable, rather than making it more conductive to innovation.
The patent system have value to society. In this particular case, a negative one. We are advancing and improving too fast and need something that slow the entire civilization down, and with a bit of luck, take us several steps backward, and this kind of patent trolls are one of the best tools for that thing.
Actually even in the early years of the Industrial revolution most inventions were really deployed only after patent's expiration.
Patents' sole merit was to make these inventions known.
They pay for ideas accepted (that they will then patent), and they share in the royalties of patents licensed. They don't just patent anything; I've had about 20% of my ideas actually accepted usually because others were seen as outside a large-enough need base (meaning not enough licensing opportunities - reduce to practice here) or not an area of interest for them. It's actually a great way to be compensated for tinkering outside your main area of expertise and income, and earn a little bit of cash for it.
And yes, they have a full lab/workshop that can be available to inventors for R&D.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Was about to mod you up, but I really hate this sort of moderation whining and have decided to never up-mod a post that complains about or tries to game moderation. In any case, otherwise a good post.
Lets say I were to invent something for the benefit of society. And I wanted to share my idea freely with the world so that everyone can benefit from it.
Patents are expensive me being a poor Joe, and just wanting to share my idea, I'm not going to patent something just to give it away for free.
If I just told everyone I knew, what would stop them from taking that idea and patenting it and thus 'owning' the idea?
Is there a way to freely publish an idea in such a way that it will not be patentable? -similar to say the GPL software licence but with allowance for the 3rd party to profit?
Is there an organization that can review these public ideas for possible applications?
Perhaps this organization could even award prize money for worthy ideas, such as the nobel prize system? (on a much smaller scale)
And what if this organization was well funded and actively sought IP rights for the explicit purpose of releasing them to the public?
oldhack: "Security is a waste of money until shit hits the fan. 5 minutes later, it becomes waste of money again. "
The book seemed to me to be a scam. Reviewers wouldn't know enough about technology to realize that the book wasn't interesting. At the time, Bill Gates and Microsoft were often in the news. So, it is easy to imagine that people bought the book, thinking that they would get something useful. A lot of copies were sold to people, apparently, who predictably would never guess that the book was, in my opinion, worthless.
You misunderstand the objections to patents. Your argument is that they stifle innovation in the short-term in return for more innovation in the long-term, and if you were right, it would indeed be a silly complaint. But that isn't true of a lot of patents these days. They ONLY stifle innovation — the theoretical effect of spurring R&D doesn't happen in a lot of cases. In fact, they retard R&D by making it increasingly risky. These patents aren't meant to protect the owner from copycats, but from people who unknowingly make something even vaguely similar to the idea behind the supposed "invention." These patents don't merely grant you protection from somebody copying your invention, but from anybody creating practically anything in the same market for the lifetime of that patent.
... patenting the business model of a patent troll?
If the right person pulled it off, they could use it to shut all the others down.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
20 years from now (or whenever Intellectual Ventures gets so mired in whatever befalls it that it can't open another lawsuit) this giant backlog of IP will all be free. In the meantime these guys are doing a kind of cheesypoof R&D shop that gets to the idea stage.... Wouldn't it be awesome if that was the hard part?
Every rule has more than one consequence.
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Whats up with corporations and their instance on changing the meaning of words?
Inventing means, well, you make something new. it does not mean you buy IP from others and claim that you invent things. Sheesh, what your doing isn't even new...
Be seeing you...