4 ms·

Yeah, it would be easier innovate on hard problems, Mr. Myhrvold, if you you weren't trying to strangle startups and small tech firms every chance you get with

by Aetius 16y ago

Yeah, it would be easier innovate on hard problems, Mr. Myhrvold, if you you weren't trying to strangle startups and small tech firms every chance you get with your Intellectual Ventures.

sabj 16y ago
I was nodding along with the premise until I came to this part. "His company, Intellectual Ventures, intentionally runs counter to the prevailing trend in Silicon Valley." By, uh, patent trolling? O_o
bpm140 16y ago
Dammit. I raced back after reading the article to post this exact statement. Once again someone beats me to the karma :)
paraschopra 16y ago
I'm not sure, but is his company every sued any startup for patent infringement. I read about his company in super-Freakonomics and he seemed to be genuinely caring about solving hard, big problems. He may be amassing patents to get protection but unless he actively screws small companies by buying patents, I'm not sure I would call his company a patent troll.
- prodigal_erik 16y ago
  They create and acquire patents for revenue, not defense. They don't need protection from infringement suits because they don't sell any products (and their research should fall within US patent law's exemption for that purpose). There's also speculation they have backed some infringement suits raised by shell companies. I'm torn. There ought to be some way to compensate researchers for actually solving hard problems (here I'm excluding a lot of poorly-examined software patents which basically claim the whole problem via the obvious solution) yet doesn't involve giving them an exclusive stranglehold on anyone using their work even accidentally.
  - jacquesm 16y ago
    The cure is worse than the disease at this point, the situation is such that the patents to tend to go overwhelmingly to those that troll rather than to those that have ideas and actually implement them. That's kind of logical too, after all having an idea and writing it up in a patentable form is much less work than following through so while the 'doers' are stuck on their first one the 'patenters' are on their 10th or more.

by Aetius 16y ago

Yeah, it would be easier innovate on hard problems, Mr. Myhrvold, if you you weren't trying to strangle startups and small tech firms every chance you get with your Intellectual Ventures.

sabj 16y ago

I was nodding along with the premise until I came to this part. "His company, Intellectual Ventures, intentionally runs counter to the prevailing trend in Silicon Valley." By, uh, patent trolling? O_o

bpm140 16y ago

Dammit. I raced back after reading the article to post this exact statement. Once again someone beats me to the karma :)

paraschopra 16y ago

I'm not sure, but is his company every sued any startup for patent infringement. I read about his company in super-Freakonomics and he seemed to be genuinely caring about solving hard, big problems. He may be amassing patents to get protection but unless he actively screws small companies by buying patents, I'm not sure I would call his company a patent troll.

prodigal_erik 16y ago
They create and acquire patents for revenue, not defense. They don't need protection from infringement suits because they don't sell any products (and their research should fall within US patent law's exemption for that purpose). There's also speculation they have backed some infringement suits raised by shell companies. I'm torn. There ought to be some way to compensate researchers for actually solving hard problems (here I'm excluding a lot of poorly-examined software patents which basically claim the whole problem via the obvious solution) yet doesn't involve giving them an exclusive stranglehold on anyone using their work even accidentally.
- jacquesm 16y ago
  The cure is worse than the disease at this point, the situation is such that the patents to tend to go overwhelmingly to those that troll rather than to those that have ideas and actually implement them. That's kind of logical too, after all having an idea and writing it up in a patentable form is much less work than following through so while the 'doers' are stuck on their first one the 'patenters' are on their 10th or more.