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World's Largest Patent Troll Fires First Salvo
ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes "Yesterday the biggest software patent troll of all finally woke from its slumbers: Intellectual Ventures filed patent infringement complaints in the US District Court of Delaware against companies in the software security, DRAM and Flash memory, and field-programmable gate array industries. Intellectual Ventures was co-founded by Microsoft's former CTO Nathan Myhrvold, with others from Intel and a Seattle-based law firm." We discussed IV's potential for patent trollery last spring.
Will IV allow licensing of their patent portfolio, or will they do like a lot of companies, just get patents so nobody else can use them?
Good, I think. Hopefully this will finally cause big companies to fight to get rid of software patents and patent troll companies as a whole.
You've been troll'd!
You've been troll'd!
Have a nice day!
Troll'd
Well, it's not good directly, but if the big companies start getting hit by patent attacks, then we might soon see absurd patent laws and approvals get an overdue overhaul. Previously, they've seemed like an advantage to the big players because they form a barrier to entry that keeps out new competition. The big players have armouries of patents and, much like nuclear weapons are supposed to protect through a principle of MAD, they didn't use them on each other much. But it seems there is rampant proliferation and we're seeing patent fights between big players erupt despite this (e.g. Nokia and Apple). So maybe disillusionment with them will creep in. And unlike nuclear weapons, disarmament is simple - big companies can't advocate for a change in the laws of Physics, but changes in the laws of the land, they can do.
Maybe it's optimistic. Maybe it will all settle down into a cartel and the patent threat to small players will remain. But if the patent trolls are greedy enough to really take a bite out of the hand that feeds them, perhaps not.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Will IV allow licensing of their patent portfolio, or will they do like a lot of companies, just get patents so nobody else can use them?
Well, from their their website they list all their "products" and services:
The first bullet appears to answer your question that yes, they do. But when you say "patent portfolio" I don't think you'll find anyone with enough cash to access to the whole portfolio, most likely it's one license to one patent at a time. I think their big "product" is providing a service to liquidate your patent very easily (like a pawn shop for patents) so far. This salvo may change that.
My work here is dung.
Corporate leeches like this are why American capitalism is in the toilet.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Evelyn Beatrice Hall, re Voltaire
these Intellectual Vulture Overlords.
< / s a r c a s m >
Good, I think. Hopefully this will finally cause big companies to fight to get rid of software patents and patent troll companies as a whole.
Actually, the response has not been to rid the world of software patents as you so hoped and the threat of Intellectual Ventures has long been affecting companies. From the article:
The threat posed by Intellectual Ventures helped prompt the rise of firms like RPX Corp. It is paid by companies to buy up potentially threatening patents; the companies receive licenses to those patents, and RPX pledges never to sue over them.
Think about that for a second. The system for software patents is so screwed up and backwards that it's cheaper to pay someone to buy up a patent and promise to never sue over it than it is for you to build a patent war chest and wait for the big one to hit. It's like patent insurance. Easily the most interesting thing in the article to me. Unfortunately this shows tolerance and a way to move forward.
My work here is dung.
My biggest gripe about patents is that they're kind of like legal blackmail. "Pay me money or I'll ruin your company in a large number of frivolous lawsuits." Patents were originally intended to protect inventors, but companies like IV have provided an evil twist.
I thought the justification for continuing tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans was that it would help the economy, because investment would trickle down through innovation / job creation. Here is a wonderful counter point to that argument.
If we want to entice the wealthy to use money to create jobs, why don't tie their rewards directly to job creation? These people are actually killing the economy and making people poor by creating a money-sink in the economy where no value is added. They are not only hurting these big companies with their greed, they are helping to force a divide in wealth distribution and indirectly making real people go hungry.
Someone should patent being a patent troll and then troll all these fucks.
Should I not have the right to sell my patent? If I sell my patent to a holding that chooses to license the patent to other manufacturers, but also sue infringers... Is that trolling?
I genuinely would like to know what /. thinks the correct answers are to these two questions.
*posting as AC to protect my karma*
I modded this guy troll. Can we get a bunch of underrated mods to make +5, Troll...
The article states that Intel is one of the investors of Intellectual Ventures. The article also says that one of the lawsuits was filed against McAfee, which Intel recently bought. So in this case, Intel is hiring someone else to sue itself - it would be much easier to hold an employee venting day if that's all they wanted to do.
Good! The sooner these patent trolls starts swarming the courtrooms, the sooner the absurdity of software patents become obvious. Let's all hope this is the beginning of the end of software patents as well as patents that are so vague and broad as to be meaningless.
Abuses of the law lead to reform.
They only license their patent portfolio.
Oh, how I wish that was all that they did. As you can see from their site:
Intellectual Ventures has been actively inventing since August 2003. The company has filed thousands of patent applications in more than 50 technology areas and has thousands of ideas under consideration.
Since 2003 they have been gumming up the USPTO as well. Note that they've filed thousands of patent applications. No mention of how many were issued. It's entirely possible that they were issued to the actual people working at IV and not to IV but a search shows nine patents issued to IV on the USPTO.
So remember the TED Laser Mosquito/Malaria technology? That's just a patent waiting to be issued then licensed but until then I wouldn't recommend building any.
My work here is dung.
Intellectual Vultures more like.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
A. set a time limit for law suits, i.e. 1yr from the commercialization of competing product.
there will be no cash incentive to sue a unproven product, unless you belive that your current offering is better.
competition will try to find alternate solution to beat the product. everyone is happy.
you miss the 1yr time frame, too bad.
no more patten trolls.
They don't do any good anymore. Little inventors cannot even hope to sue a company like Intellectual Ventures unless they can find a lawyer willing--and able--to last years of litigation against the kind of legal resources such a company can focus on them. God help the poor SoB if IV retaliates by claiming infringement on half a dozen of its patents in the process of creating your own patent.
The reason people still support them is "fairness." It's not "fair" that people have great ideas but someone else monetizes them in a better way. Then someone says "they worked so hard and then someone stole the idea." All the hard work (misdirected or that produces nothing of value) in the world and a $1.50 still won't buy you a latte at Starbucks. As it shouldn't!
And ironically, all this system creates is one that is often unjust. Some poor guy who thinks he may become the next Bill Gates will probably have IV nuke him from orbit with a patent lawsuit right as he gets big enough that he's worth having Guido and Vinny, J.D. show up at his office with an offer he can't refuse ("hey, great idea you got going, it would be a shame if anything happened to it...")
Imaginary property like patents and copyright always consolidates power over information into the hands of the few. They do not protect the creators, they make ideas a commodity to be traded.
Great Intellect...
It's obvious what their company theme song should be: Never Gonna Give You Up
I am officially gone from
Last year, an old colleague calls and wanted to recruit me for this. Initially the idea of working of Myhrvold piqued my interest. I met with their team and got the scoop. The business plan is solid and I think they have a great chance to make money. They certainly had the money to offer talent to work for them. But as I never worked for the porn houses, Haliburton or a myriad other sketchy places I politely declined. My rule of being able to look Grandma in the eye and tell here who/what my work is didn't match up.
Below are links to background info, but keep in mind that trolls create a tax, but they're not the big problem. They're generally not the patent holders that break standards or exclude free software projects. They're just after money, so they are parasites to the rich. The MPEG-LA patents, for example, are much more harmful (they blocked HTML5 from including a standard video format) and are held by "real" software companies.
swpat.org is a publicly editable wiki, help welcome.
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
money != capitalism.
Epic, epic fail there.
It's a medium of exchange.
You could, for example, hand over a house instead of a shiny number and that person who built the factory can go live in that house or exchange it for a small farm acreage and the work of someone to grow the food.
That is still a captialist system.
Yet no shiny imaginary construct required.
Go easy on the guy- Nathan doesn't have enough money or power... He NEEDs to troll patents to make the voices go away.
dammit Taco, now it's just showing (Score:5)
Starting Score: 1 point
Moderation +4
80% Underrated
20% Troll
Total Score: 5
I say we fired back, from orbit and nuke their head quarter while all their lawyers and officers are inside the building.
I have no problem with what IBM does. They are a practicing entity which is directly opposite of what IV does. The difference is that a high rate of IBM's patents are granted. This is proper use of the patent system because IBM then makes those products.
I suspect Intellectual Ventures spends a nice chunk of it's money on forcing patents through the system. Thousands of patents that evidently have little business being patents. But their legion of lawyers persists pushing these patents and revisioning them. Yes, they pay thousands of dollars on each patent to do this but this is an abuse of the patent system if they do this just because they have money.
Imagine if this first salvo results in hundreds of millions of dollars going to IV. Then what? Then that money goes into putting more strain on the USPTO and more lawyers are hired to push unwarranted patents through the system. Then those win more suits and more lawyers are hired in a classic breeder model of lawyer propagation. If my calculations are correct, by the year 2054 the Earth will be a mass of patent lawyers expanding outward at the speed of light only to eventually collapse back in on itself causing a "Big Crunch" and ending the universe until the next big bang. Intellectual Ventures must be stopped (with apologies to Stanislaw Lem).
But seriously, the two are totally different in that one produces and one sues.
My work here is dung.
She's already been reported to Anonymous as the lead prosecutor in the Assange case. She will feel my love yet.
My work here is dung.
If any entities deserve some punitive taxation, these people and their lawyers should be it. They produce nothing and simply suck capital from the producers. How about a 90% tax rate on lawyer fees from lawsuits. Let's see how long the lawyers stick around. Oh wait - lawyers write the tax code, shit.
Conservative, mod down for violating
>File Patent Infringement Claims
>You were eaten by a Grue!
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
Maybe they should sue Rambus, who from what I can hear is suing everybody again.... seems like their patents might infringe on some of these patents.
Make America grate again!
Intellectual Vultures
Well, we need more than that, but starting with an anti-troll law would be a great start. Such law might go something like this:
The Jeff Foxworthy "You might be a Patent Troll"
1. If you own a patent and have no intention of actually making something with it, ... ... ...?
2. If you have a bunch of patents and are trying to extract a bunch of money from a bunch of companies,
3. If you
Okay very simply, you cannot transfer patents except in extremely narrow views.
Husband to wife, Company purchase of another company, and internal company.
Thus you cannot buy up patents without buying up companies. It will also help patent holders retain rights and make more money.
Is this not done now?
I can program myself out of a Hello World Contest!!
So they are suing three of the four main FPGA vendors (Altera, Actel/Microsemi and Lattice) but not the big one, Xilinx. So did Xilinx settle with IV, and if so, for how much?
Wrong! Retarded patent troll suits are to be filed in East Texas. What kind of noob is this guy?
The simplest way to reform the patent system is to require a patent holder to produce a saleable product based on their patents. If they don't produce a saleable item the patent shold be null and void.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
"investor" == blackmailed victim. Simple double speak.
Patent troll? More like a patent Mofia. ("You usea my IP, I breaka you face")
This is just silly. IV hasn't made a lick of intelligent anything, but because of the way the law is, they are allowed to misuse the concept of intellectual property as a simple money making tool via licenses.
IT laws were MEANT to protect individuals' work and thus ENCOURAGE creativity and innovation. But all this useless garbage simply makes the real innovators afraid to poke their heads out. Where will our innovation go? While these pigs have fun abusing the system, America will go down the pits as it has been because of this ridiculousness. I wonder how much capital these losers can make once there aren't anymore inventors around to abuse.
Foul is the word. Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold wrote The Road Ahead a book that sold because Bill Gates was supposedly involved in writing it, but contained nothing interesting, almost as if several editors were hired to remove any accidentally included good ideas.
Bill Gates is one of the Investors in Intellectual Ventures. These are not nice people. They want themselves to be rich, and other people to suffer. Just being rich is not enough.
One of the first things out of the mouth of the presiding judge was a statement to the effect of
with photos of the plaintiff's legal team's facial expressions then printed in major publications and websites.
(Yeah... I know it's probably not in the judge's power to look at the patent cases in that way -- at least according to the letter of the law -- but in the spirit of the law, when it was written, you'd think that sort of way of looking at a patent suit would be a given.)
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
So much for the claims of any business entity that it is buying up patents for "defensive purposes only." Assuming that IV prevails (as I'm assuming it will), look for more patent clearinghouses (supposedly established to "protect" their clients from the dreaded patent trolls) to start using patent litigation to assertively attempt to monetize their newly-acquired IP assets.