An inside look at Intellectual Ventures 146
A reader writes"Nathan Myhrvold has started a multi-hundred million dollar firm to develop new inventions and patent them. It has remained a very secretive organization, despite recruiting reclusive geniuses and buying up thousands of patents from other companies. Now Business Week has the scoop: "As his cash-rich firm snaps up thousands of patents, fears emerge that it will become a leader in litigation - not innovation..."
A vile trade (Score:4, Insightful)
I hope that this venture exercises some restraint in its persuits.
Great! Now R&D will be outsourced to India/Chi (Score:3, Insightful)
Only lawyer and lobbying firms.
Re: A vile trade (Score:4, Insightful)
Man is an economic animal, and will harvest any niche the law will allow.
I'm tempted to say we should fix the law rather than relying on restraint, but the most recent patent legislation the US Congress was considering looked like it was going to 'fix' the problem by letting the big guys walk all over the little guys.
The wonderful US legal system (Score:5, Insightful)
If you have a lot of money right now and are looking for the next easy buck you don't get much better than IP ownership at the moment. You know that Congress, Senate and the President are all gunning for greater IP protection and longevity, and you know that a large and growing proportion of the current patent stock are for either obvious ideas or taking of "real-world" ideas and putting an "e" infront of them.
Its hard to critisise it as a money making venture, but as low-life pond scum go its right up there with being a convicted monopolist.
As with any business venture like this (Score:2, Insightful)
While yes, such a concentration of bright people can really lock down the rest of the industry (although not likely), it's also something completely unique that we should really give a chance.
Inventions help people, yes, as with any business involving intellectual property, there is room for abuse, but there is also room for incredible progress. At how many software firms do you bring in brilliant scientists, and vice versa. Cross-applying technology can really help benefit us as a society.
What's the difference between Apple or Microsoft plunging millions of dollars into R&D and then licensing their technology out to other companies? Isn't this exactly the same?
Wake up people, fear mongering about this company is completely misdirected, they have a good opportunity to do a lot of good, the true fear that should be exposed here is the ability to abuse the intellectual property laws in america, IV has nothing to do with it.
Re:A vile trade (Score:4, Insightful)
If you RTFA, that's not the business model. It's something they may have to do when patents of theirs (they apply for their own patents as well as buy some up) get infringed and the other party won't agree to license it, but that's no different than any other firm protecting its assets.
The article summary plays up the litigation angle out of all proportion. Getting a variety of top minds to focus on how to make major technological advances is a worthy enterprise.
Re:As with any business venture like this (Score:5, Insightful)
The lack of millions of dollars in R&D. This company is doing two things: 1) it buys up patents or cross licenses them from other companies or 2) just have people brainstorm ideas and patent them. There's no actual invention going on here. Invention requires coming up with an idea and making it work. The making it work part is the most important. What they are doing is screwing over those in the future who will make it work by patenting it now.
This guy knows exactly what he's doing (Score:5, Insightful)
The patent system in its current form gives the patent holder the right to prevent others from using the patent - not protect your invention. It's a subtle legal argument that makes the patent system the broken form it is today. By preventing others from using your invention, you have the ability to make others either pay you to use your idea legally, or, give you the right to practice something that the other patent holder is preventing you from doing.
So, this guy, by patenting ideas, no matter how bogus they may be, will gain a lot of ability to stop anyone and everyone from practicing anything he comes up with. In effect - he'll be rich without every actually producing any working product - just patenting all sorts of new potential ideas that may or may not come to be.
What is really slick was how this guy just milked several geniuses for idea, and he won't have to pay them for it. The whole "meeting" where he's asking top notch people in their field to come up with improvements on state of the art - this was his way of getting all the ideas to patent, and he doesn't have to reward any of it back to the people who came up with the ideas since they probably, (and stupidly) gave it up to him by coming to his "innovation conference". Notice how all of it was getting recorded? This will be his "proof" of when the idea was come up with, giving whoever owns this the right to the patent. Even if let's say he does allow the person who was in the room who came up with the idea - I guarentee that the patent will be assigned to his corporation since he "reimbursed" that "inventor" for their time with payment - i.e. whatever he paid them to come to his innovation conference.
This person knows exactly what he's doing and is playing the patent game perfectly. At this rate, he will win, or his antics will slow down the ability for new ideas to actually be produced, and heaven forbid, laws may have to be written to stop this type of behavior. I doubt the latter will come to pass.
Re:As with any business venture like this (Score:4, Insightful)
Your appeal is misdirection. The entire point of the article is that the company is engaging in a pattern that should invite scrutiny. Microsoft and Apple's primary focus is to create products which they sell. They invest in research to give them a competitive advange, to increase the value of their products, and to acquire patents which would lock out smaller competitors. An idea farm such is this exists solely to exploit the patent system, for good or ill, but with the system rigged the way it is now, which would not have happend if powerful interests didn't want it that way, the propensity for ill is far greater than that of good.
Warren Buffet (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Old Idea (Score:2, Insightful)
Their part of TFA is "spin" (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What do they get? (Score:3, Insightful)
That is the question and we'll probably just have to wait and see before pronouncing them trolls. On the face of it, it seems like it could be a good idea. Kind of modeling after the university research model where they do the research come up with some innovation and just license it to other companies to produce rather than producing it themselves. Where they are more of a think-tank specializing in coming up with new ideas and leaving the manufacturing, marketing, etc to others who can specialize in that stuff. Doesn't sound like a bad idea at least in the abstract, but in todays envrionment of soo many patent suits, patent troll, etc, etc the sound does also tend to make one a bit uneasy.
Again, I think we have to take a wait and see approach here as it could be either really good or really bad.
Simple Solution to patent trolls (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Violence and Patents (Score:5, Insightful)
It is perhaps possible that you are not from Africa, and thus do not know that there are actually a lot of blacks in Africa that insist AIDS is a white conspiracy of some sort. The exact conspiracy changes, but the disbelief in AIDS doesn't.
There are several areas in Africa with 70% + HIV infection rates among blacks. On the whole, the whites dont get AIDS and the blacks do. There has been quite a bit of headscratching about this, and there seem to be several factors involved:
1) Male circumcision - Recent studies seem to show that male circumcision decreases the chance of a male becoming infected by a factor of around 7. That's a huge factor. A lot of whites are circumcised, but very few blacks are (in the high infection areas I am speaking about).
2) Social mores and ignorance - Several of the black cultures involved have very different attitudes to sex and safe sex. In many areas its almost impossible for the woman to get the man to wear a condom, because of both ignorance and the low social status of women. There is often basic ignorance of the concept of a germ theory of disease.
3) Whites tend to have fewer concurrent sexual partners. For those steeped in Western social mores or with a penchant for political correctness, I'm not saying either whites or blacks are heedless and promiscuous. However, I am saying that it is a lot more acceptable to have more than one concurrent stable sexual relationship in many black cultures, and this makes it easier for AIDS to spread than the white cultural tendency to have many partners in succession.
4) Fundamental disbelief in AIDS - It's hard to get people to take precautions when they think you are talking out your ass. When people die, the disease that killed them is pointed to as the cause of death, not AIDS. So, malaria, tuberculosis, and the flu have been really bad lately.
This means there are areas with near 100% infection rates in blacks, and very low infection rates in whites. It has nothing to do with race, and probably everything to do with social mores, conventions, and culture.
I don't claim to be the last word on this, but I came to the conclusions above after speaking to a fair number of people, some of them paramedics, and some of them farmers in remote areas.
Re:That's not how patents work... (Score:1, Insightful)
That's a completely antisocial attitude. The other inventor just put their entire life savings and untold years coming up with ingenious work, and you would have me rob him of the proceeds of his work, just because I did something similar? Aren't we supposed to live in a free society, where everyone is allowed to apply their talents to the best of their ability?
Without this kind of protection, why bother inventing anything? Just wait for other people to invent it, and then manufacture their invention.
Why do people do anything in any field, if they don't get monopoly protection for 20 years? Somehow even lawyers can carry out their own business and develop innovative new ideas for legal arguments, although they don't get monopoly rights to them. The answer of course is that you try out new ideas to prosper in business. Competition in a free market ensures that the best solutions win out.
Re:Old Idea (Score:3, Insightful)
The first US patent law was passed in 1790, and gave a term of 14 years with the possibility of a 7 year extension. In 1836, the possibility of an extension was removed, and the original term was extended to 17 years. It stayed at 17 years until 1995.
Up to that point, the term of a patent was measured from the time the patent was granted. In 1995, the law was changed so the term of a patent is measured from the time the patent is filed instead. Since it typically takes around 3 years for a patent to be granted, they changed the coverage to be 20 years from when the patent is filed. This change gets rid of a few abuses some people used to keep patents in the system for years (decades, in some cases) to extend their coverage far beyond what was ever really intended.
This gives some minimal extension to a few patents that are granted relatively quickly. OTOH, it shortens the term of patents that take longer to be granted. There's also a special provision for drug patents to have their coverage extended in case the patent would be expired (or nearly so) before the FDA approved its sale.
All in all, there's been little overall change. Some patents granted under the current law will probably get a couple of years more than they would have under the 1790 law, but there are almost certainly other patents that get less. I don't know for sure, but I suspect that on average, patents now expire a bit sooner than they did at that time.