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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."
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
The moderators are angrily moderating to reflect their opinions, which is I guess par for the course, but here goes again...
I can protect my own tangible property.
You can protect intellectual property the same ay you protect tangible property: by using force to prevent others from making use of it.
If I sell my patent or copyrighted work, I still have it
Define "have". The thoughts which can be formed into the work still exist in your head, but you don't get to make or distribute any tangible expression of those thoughts. You can make that expression, just as you can take back something you've just sold, use it when the other guy isn't, or even use it when he is, if the item can be shared.
It takes FAR more government intervention to protect real property than it does intellectual 'property.'
It depends. It's a lot easier, say, for me to get away with stealing your car and selling it on than with selling bootleg copies of some work you have published. Ideas and their expressions have in the past 500 years been controlled far more than the exchange of tangibles, from the Holy Roman Empire's grants of privilegium to Soviet censorship. You may sell your ass, but don't advertise it as resembling your leader. Ideas are way easier to harmonise than *stuff*, though the idealistic student of every generation thinks otherwise.
But that is what intellectual property is: temporary monopoly granted for the advancement of the arts and sciences.
No, that's merely the Constitutionalist viewpoint of what IP should instead be. There is also the viewpoints that intellectual property is to be thought of as much like physical property as is possible, and - most importantly - for the benefit of the owner rather than the people.
Governance derives from the masses.
I don't get this. What are you trying to say?
Comment removed based on user account deletion