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> seeded by money [...] from Intellectual Ventures Hm, what's IV's play here?
by jahabrewer 8y ago
> seeded by money [...] from Intellectual Ventures
Hm, what's IV's play here?
- toomuchtodo 8y agoCornering the easy part of vehicle autonomy. Capture the sensor profit, make everyone else continue the hard ML slog. “Sell shovels.”
- Pharmakon 8y agoNot just that, but even if it turns out that slog is decades long, those miners will still need those shovels. It’s brilliant, because barring a sudden implosion of SDVA research, this is a guaranteed income stream independent of the success of SDV tech.
- gumby 8y agoIV was explicitly founded as a patent troll. I find their processes so nefarious that I avoid talking to their employees when I run into them at conferences.
- nardi 8y agoI don’t know anything about IV or their business practices, but it sounds like in this case they are funding research in order to patent useful inventions that they could then presumably license to manufacturers. Doesn’t sound like patent trolling.
- greglindahl 8y agoIV always had a few things like this, google mosquito laser. It always seemed like they wanted enough that a few people wouldn't think they're trolls, but they're trolls.
- closeparen 8y agoPatent trolls are the secondary market for IP; whether they fund it pre or post hoc is not that important.
- tomp 8y agoHuh?! Your description basically accuses many universities and VCs for being patent trolls, as they develop / fund and then licence technology, but don’t productivise it...
- closeparen 8y agoYeah, basically. Patent trolling is a red herring - just a form of economic specialization. Selling your patents to a troll or hiring an attorney to enforce them for you are just different labels for the same transaction. It's just that, in software anyway, many more things are patentable than ought to be. And arguably the whole concept behind patent law has proved unnecessary necessary in our field - "good" actors deduplicate efforts and share mutually beneficial IP via the open source community. Someone in software using the patent system at all is probably acting in bad faith, or else building a moat to defend themselves from bad-faith actors.
- cwkoss 8y agoBlind the public with lasers, fix with the patented blindness treatment