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Intellectual Ventures Sheds At Least Part of Its "Patent Troll" Reputation
pacopico writes Intellectual Ventures, the world's most infamous patent troll, has changed its tune — maybe. According to a story in Businessweek, the company has started turning a number of its ideas into products, ranging from hydration sensors to waterless washing machines and self-healing concrete. The story reveals some new tidbits about IV, including that it pays inventors $17,000 per idea, has a new start-up fund and that one of its cofounders got tossed out of school for hacking. IV is obvisouly trying to improve its reputation, but plenty of skeptics remain who think this is just a ruse meant to draw attention away from its patent lawsuits.
Is that punishing patent trolls causes innovation.
When This American Life did its expose on Intellectual Ventures' activities a few years ago, IV talked about their labs and made many claims that the money was being used to fund innovation and create new products - a claim that did not stand up to even a modicum of scrutiny.
Basically IV is just trying to find a new patsy to listen to its same old song. Welcome to the show, Business Week!
#DeleteChrome
So can I get a laser mosquito blaster in time for my next party?
Seriously, why don't they just change their name to Intellectual Vultures? I'd at least respect them for their honesty.
The article mentioned a handful of startups but there is no mention of any of these startups actually producing a product that people can buy. If you actually could buy a product or service from an Intellectual Ventures backed company this would be a powerful affirmation that IV is a real contributor and not just a troll.
That this PR piece makes no mention of such a product, making it very clear this has not happened. I expect this will never happened. IV startups are not meant to produce and sell product. They are meant to be bought out and bought out for a much larger sum than IV could get from just licensing the IP.
Now, there is nothing wrong with a startup selling out before it can bring it's product to market but it is a little bit dishonest to plan it that way.
Which, I suppose is an improvement over IV's normal policy of simply sitting on technology until a practicing entity re-invents it and then suing them. Still, it is a long way from showing that the world is better with Intellectual Ventures than without them.
I know patent trolls are about as popular here as child molesters, but here I am, coming to their defense..,
Suppose you are the inventor of something marvelous, like say, intermittent windshield wipers. You are not likely to have the capital to start your own car company, so how do you monetize your invention? You do the obvious: approach the existing car companies about licensing. Now, if you don't happen to know the story of Rober Kearns, you may want to look him up, but the TL;DR version is that if you are not ready to spend years and $MILLIONS in court, the giants will just steam roll right over you, taking your invention with them.
Enter the "patent troll".
Patent trolls are your key to monetizing your invention. They have the expertise and the money to see a court case through. They are not producers themselves so the multi-nationals can't shut them down using their own patent portfolios. If the patent is a good one, they stand a real chance of winning in court and they compete against each other for such opportunities, so they form an alternative market where your invention can fetch you a tidy sum. They will expect a discount obviously; they assume a substantial risk, after all, due to the uncertain nature of litigation.
The facts that patent trolls don't invent anything and don't make anything are often held up here on Slashdot as reasons to deride these companies. These are red herrings. Many companies exist which perform valuable functions in society without doing either of these things. Patent trolls are among them.
I will grant that there have been some absurd patent cases ltigated by patent trolls, but that's a separate issue. If anybody's reputation should suffer for these absurdities, it should be the patent office's. The troll is just doing its duty by its investors to run a profitable company by obtaining maximum value for its patent assests.
Patent trolls aren't small inventors. They are groups of rich people hiding behind paper corporations. They buy their patents from others. Then they do nothing with them. They only sue those who later come up with the same idea. The whole point of the patent system was to act as an incentive for people to come up with, make use of and ultimately publicize their ideas. This was to keep technology progressing to benefit us all. The whole point of a patent troll is to extract money from people who actually try to make a product. Patent trolls hurt us all.
If YOU are a small inventor and you have a good idea you cannot implement yourself then by all means, sell it to someone who can and will. Don't feel entitled to become instantly rich. The hard work is going to be in testing, implementing and marketing the idea. We already established that you will not be doing that. If it's good then you should be able to expect a nice pay day though. If you think the world owes you free lunch for life just because you came up with an idea which you will now jealously gaurd and make sure the world (now paying your way) doesn't benefit from that idea for the next 20 years... well screw you then!
I'd rather see the expiration for patents depend on whether they're actually being implemented or not. Coming up with a new idea is great, but only if something actually comes out of it. If you can't get somebody to license and build it in a reasonable number of years, all the patent is really doing is cluttering up the idea space for companies that are inventing things in-house with the actual intent of building them.
Right now, every time a company comes up with a cool new invention, they have to search through mountains of patents to see if somebody, somewhere has done it before and is just sitting on the patent. A system that puts a greater burden on inventors who bring things to market than on inventors who don't is not balanced correctly. Maintaining a patent monopoly should require continuous effort to put that idea to work in something useful.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"