Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.)
WARNING
Parent post filled with misinformed bullshit.
The US remains the leading manufacturer in the world by value: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Economy#Manufacturing
I hate idiot grammar trolls who don't understand that International English sometimes works differently from the American dialect. It's confusing to many English speakers from outside the US to use a naked modal verb without an auxiliary, and thus they use expressions like "I can do" or "I might do" rather than "I can" or "I might." In these cases "do" marks the absence of a true auxiliary. It's by no means ungrammatical or even unusual syntax.
These numbers are bogus. They include products made abroad by nominally American companies. All the cars produced by GM in China are counted as part of this. If you remove the offshore production, the GDP and manufacturing has been in decline for more than a decade. This has been exposed multiple times in the business press. BusinessWeek had an excellent article on this about a year back.