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Nathan Myhrvold’s Patent Extortion Fund Is Reaping Hundreds Of Millions of Dollars
- sfamiliar 18y agoif person.has_idea? && person.can_afford?(patent_attorney) { business.start! } makes an entrepreneur hope that his idea stays under the radar.
- biohacker42 18y agoPerfect. The system won't get fixed until someone uses it to the full extent. Lets remember that it is big corporations that lobby for the kind of patent and IP law that makes this possible. On top of that, you have the over loaded patent office assuming bad patents will get sorted out in court. While at the same time judges assume that if a patent was granted it was legit. To fix the system, you have to break it first. Perfect.
- rudyfink 18y agoI hope your logic does not also apply to representative government :-/
- ryanwaggoner 18y agoReminds me of a quote by Thomas Jefferson...something about the tree of liberty :-)
- biohacker42 18y agoSadly it kind of does. It's surprising just how many governments have followed the same pattern. First they grow and grow and grow. Reform is occasional and minor (at best), eventually they get so big and bad that a crisis forces real change. The state is then transformed into a lean mean productive machine. Which starts to grow slowly and the process repeats. Of the top of my head I can think of Sweden, where a crisis forced massive reform and now it's almost ready for a crisis again. And Great Britain in the 1970, crisis -> Thatcher -> prosperity -> growing government -> less prosperity -> coming crisis. Guess where the US is in that cycle.
- andyjenn 18y agoInteresting to see how that follows the cost of a barrel of crude oil.. roughly
- Harkins 18y agoThe problem with "fixing" the problem is that his company now has a huge stake in the system not changing, or at least in not loosening restrictions. Now that the company has extracted so much money from other companies, it can very effectively lobby Congress to ensure that the patent system doesn't undermine his business model. It's now self-perpetuating. Look at some of Lessig's videos on Change Congress; he's talked about how Congress, while restructuring and changing regulation on the telecom industry in the 90s, was careful to ensure that what was left over would be able to contribute to re-election campaigns.
- gojomo 18y agoSee also: Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac.
- aston 18y agoI met Nathan Myhrvold while giving his son a tour of my school. He struck me as a much nicer guy than what all of these articles play him up as. Extortion is almost certainly too bold of a term for what his company does. The patent system was set up to be taken advantage of in this exact way. If someone comes up with/legally documents an idea before you do, you have to get them to let you use it (via licensing fees). I don't see how that's tantamount to protection money. If you're one of the companies involved, there's pretty clear net gain for you since you're essentially outsourcing R&D to some smart people and virtually extending your patent portfolio at the same time, which is an asset on its own.
- chaostheory 18y agohow is this outsourcing r&d?
- aston 18y agoIntellectual Ventures is basically all R. These guys are indeed buying up patents, but they're doing a lot of thought themselves about how to solve problems and then going out and doing the due diligence to acquire all of the assets (patents, theirs or others') they need to present a full solution to a company.
- asda55 18y agoYou sound like Myrhvold's mom. How is this outsourcing R&D if you've already done the R&D, since you're clearly using the techniques, and then Nathan comes along and takes you to court for millions? You're buying into the spin. Intellectual Ventures is not a think-tank for nuclear geniuses and never was. Do you really believe the marketing story Intellectual Ventures puts out? Do you think that Trident makes your teeth whiter, and that Snapple is made from the best stuff on earth?
- aston 18y agoI actually am his mom. Just curious, though, do you actually have any evidence that Intellectual Ventures is charging people for stuff they were already doing? Have they taken anyone to court over these patents? I'm not buying their spin, I'm assuming their innocence until guilt is proven.
- chaostheory 18y agoI love how the spirit of MS lives on strong in their alumni...
- fusionman 18y agoI have to give him credit for being clever. Broken system? yes. Clever? yes. It seems as if these big companies simply invest in his fund as a hedge to the licensing fees they are going to have to pay.
- awt 18y agoIt's broken in the same sense that the domain name registration system is broken. Spend a little money and you can roadblock a lot of ideas.
- ryanwaggoner 18y agoVery few good ideas are dependent on getting a certain domain name.
- eru 18y agoBut you can roadblock a lot of good domain names with a little money.
- mindslight 18y agoIt's surprising how many people (in the comments) are outraged over what is basically a way for someone who is not a big company to outsource the inevitable legal wrangling of commercializing their invention. What _is_ broken is that the patent office and courts have completely ignored that whole "obvious to a practitioner of the art" thing. Patents are supposed to protect novel inventions. Instead people get patents for deciding to enter a market first. Invalidating Amazon's "1-click shopping" patent shouldn't require prior art, but just a simple poll of the tech community saying "duh, that's what cookies were designed for".
- noonespecial 18y agoIt's surprising how many people (in the comments) are outraged over what is basically a way for someone who is not a big company to outsource the inevitable legal wrangling of commercializing their invention. What most people miss about rackets like this is that even after you pay off vultures like these they almost never offer you indemnity. That means some one else can sue you for exactly the same technology with a similar vague patent claim. In fact, they probably will, since you seem willing to pay.
- mindslight 18y agoTheir (new) client's implementation could very well independently violate another patent or an unknown extension of the licensed patent. What would they gain from taking on this risk? The broken patent system has bumbled along precisely because large companies generally have cross licensing deals with each other, leaving only the little guy subject to vague infringement claims. Now that there's a well-funded company which doesn't require 'incoming' licenses (by not making anything), there's real money involved for the big guys. On another day I might be arguing for abolishing patents, but I just don't see how this is an abuse of the current system.
- mattmcknight 18y agoHow can we stop it?
- jcromartie 18y agoHave any small or medium-sized businesses stood up to this bullshit in court? I would like to imagine that if I were in the situation of being sued by one of these patent-wielding cowards I would say no to licensing and the inevitable attempt at settlement.
- MaysonL 18y ago...and he hasn't even had to sue anybody yet. With Danny Hillis, Neal Stephenson, and Sanjay Prasad (former chief patent attorney at Oracle, and an ouspoken proponent of patent reform) on board, I doubt that it's your garden-variety patent troll.