14 ms·

PlainSite Exposes 2,000 Intellectual Ventures Shell Companies

298 points by thinkcomp 14y ago

manhonest 14y ago
I don't care what anyone says, Aaron Greenspan you have once again impressed me... can't say the same for Zuckerberg. Well done. As for IV, I came across an amusing quote from their co-founder at a recent conference: he claimed, among other things, that 1. concerns about IV's consistent use of _cryptically-named_ shells[1] is a "red herring" and 2. for $80K any company could do a freedom-to-operate analysis on every claim in IV's entire portfolio. 1. You need not browse past page one of Aaron's list to get a taste of how descriptive the shell company names are. Take, for example, Aht Chu LLC. As the co-founder noted at the conference, thousands of shell companies with cryptic names are necessary because they make it easier for IV to segregate its IP assets. I suspect there might have some other advantages too. ;)
- praptak 14y ago
  > Take, for example, Aht Chu LLC. Ok, this convinced me that Myhrvold is just the biggest troll on Earth, I'm just worried he might have got too immersed in his role. "What the name of your company?" "Aht Chu" "Bless you! Now what's the name of your company?" "Aht Chu" "Awww, you seem to have a bad cold."
namank 14y ago
Company list: http://www.plainsite.org/tags/index.html?id=640 http://www.plainsite.org/tags/index.html?id=640
- anigbrowl 14y ago
  It's not possible to look at any page but the first one. Entering another number takes you to page with links to 24 hour Fitness and 3M Corporation. Also, clicking on the individual entries doesn't provide you with any evidence or a link to the USPTO record, just the company's mailing address. Sounded interesting, but all we've got here is the badly-presented output of a web scraping session.
  - ChuckMcM 14y ago
    Hmm maybe we're not seeing the same thing this URI: //www.plainsite.org/tags/index.html?table=entitiestags&page=3&id=640 You can change the page=3 to any number between 1 and 44 to get more company names.
    - anigbrowl 14y ago
      Apparently it's been fixed so it works in the page now, but why on earth would I want to edit the URL as a navigation method?
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - eteasley 14y ago
    The page number field is working for me now.
damian2000 14y ago
He seems like a smart guy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Myhrvold http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Myhrvold ... wonder what made him turn his hand to patent litigation?
- bryanh 14y ago
  Money.
  - sp332 14y ago
    Short but true. He has explained that, even though it doesn't really make sense, the current regulatory environment makes this business extremely profitable and it makes (business) sense to do it.
  - batgaijin 14y ago
    I don't buy that... and he knows he's villifying himself in the tech industry. Perhaps I'm a bit of a romantic but I think he's doing it on purpose. If you know the game is rigged, and will have massive effects on the future of technological development, you have quite the motivation to show the flaws. To anyone doubting me: think about it. We all know IV, these connections to shell corporations are new but they are also inevitable. Why wouldn't they play it slower? Why wouldn't they make sure there was no overlap? These are technocrats; they know the smallest smudge can haunt them. Do you think the tracks were left by accident?
    - rdl 14y ago
      Arguably most of the tech industry (at least people over 25 or so) already hated him due to his role at Microsoft, so he's used to that. If he is actually engaged in a "long troll" against the patent industrial complex, then he's worthy of approximately every science and economics prize in the world. I just don't think that's his style, though.
    - smokeyj 14y ago
      I'm happy this guy exists. Sure, we can use logic to deduce ideas aren't property. But not until a troll comes around do the masses pay attention. I hope he makes a fortune making a mockery out of the mockery.
001sky 14y ago
I'd like to see the NY Times do investigative reporting like this.
- NatW 14y ago
  Agreed. NPR / This American Life did a great piece on Patent Trolls "When Patents Attack" (in case you missed it): http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/441/when-patents-attack http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/441/w...
  - 001sky 14y ago
    I'm thinking more of the data analytics-heavy reporting, reviewing public records and making them more accessible, etc. Almost a new breed of thinking and approach to the subject matter.
paulsutter 14y ago
I'm fascinated by the vexatious litigant point. Would a lawyer here care to comment on that? Once found a vexatious litigant, an entity can no longer file suit in court. In California, for example, all it takes to be found a vexatious litigant is to file five unsuccessful lawsuits in seven years [1]. Could something similar be used to stop Intellectual Ventures somehow? I'd love to understand it. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vexatious_litigation#United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vexatious_litigation#United_Sta...
- gottagetmac 14y ago
  The provision you're referring to only applies to pro se litigants (people who represent themselves in court).
- 001sky 14y ago
  A litigant though is a 'legal person'. if you have 2000 legal entities (ie, legally== persons), it seems to help you on the math. But your question still stands and is a good one. Its not clear what role a common "controling entity" would have, for example, on the ability of affiliates, spv's and relatives/children to file or be found 'vexatious' etc.[1] ________ [1] INAL, but I think this question should be answerable.
  - rdl 14y ago
    While I'm generally against RICO as law, this seems like one case where it would be reasonable to apply.
- grabeh 14y ago
  Speaking in relation to the UK, a litigant would only be considered to be vexatious where a claim was considered to be without merit and was only being brought for the purpose of causing annoyance, which is a fairly high threshold to prove. With IV, the issue is that they at least have an arguable case that patents they hold have been infringed. I would therefore think that they would not approach the threshold of being considered a vexatious litigant. The problem is that the patents have been granted in the first place, and once granted, companies are free to use them as they please or at least argue their case. Of course, the same patents could be revoked in a court action but I acknowledge that the principal aim is to extract royalties from companies before the matter ever comes to court. On the California provision you mention, this contains certain caveats which would mean the person would be free to file as many suits as they wanted where the claim was of a sufficiently low value. Presumably the provision is designed to prevent the individual representing themself from continuously filing frivolous suits against companies claiming vast damages, arguably due to the chilling effect this might have on companies doing business.
batgaijin 14y ago
Now do bg3.
sidcool 14y ago
Can someone pls explain me what happened here?
- charonn0 14y ago
  Intellectual Ventures is a company who own the rights to large patent portfolios. Rather than use the patents to, say, make something useful, they sue or threaten to sue other companies. For various legal and PR reasons, they file suits using "shell" companies, a company wholly owned by Intellectual Ventures and which exists only or largely on paper. They are exploiting a vulnerability in the system for profit and at the expense of system resources, stability, and usefulness. There's no requirement that a private company disclose all the various names under which it operates, so the only way to list all the shell companies used by this one operation is to correlate thousands of public records held by the Patent Office to see which companies can be linked to Intellectual Ventures.
- namank 14y ago
  instead of using patents to invent new things, they use patents to sue people and make money.
  - ahi 14y ago
    Which would only be sort of bad if the patents weren't shit.
rdl 14y ago
This is the kind of stuff I wish WikiLeaks did.
- 001sky 14y ago
  Wanted: Wikileaks need a "growth hacker" for a new business line: Organize, Understand public avail information=D Jokes aside, it does takes some technical chop to get thru the garbage public records, apparently.
Elepsis 14y ago
At first glance, this list is a bit of a joke. Just on the first page you see Acco Brands (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACCO_Brands http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACCO_Brands) and Agere Systems (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agere_Systems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agere_Systems), which shows that not even the most rudimentary fact checking went into this effort. Unfortunate, because I think they're trying to add transparency in an area where it's badly needed. But using such a blatantly inaccurate methodology undermines pretty much everything they're trying to do.
- mherdeg 14y ago
  Tom Ewing's paper ( http://stlr.stanford.edu/pdf/feldman-giants-among-us.pdf http://stlr.stanford.edu/pdf/feldman-giants-among-us.pdf , datestamped Jan. 2012) says they've identified 1,276 shell companies, which is quite a bit lower than the 2,201 items listed by PlainSite. (In his interview with Ira Glass, broadcast in July 2011, Ewing said there's "very close to 1,300" shell companies, http://www.thisamericanlife.org/sites/default/files/TAL441_transcript.pdf http://www.thisamericanlife.org/sites/default/files/TAL441_t... , so I guess he's been working on this for a while.)
manhonest 14y ago
Other attempts at this task: 1. Google search: feldman-giants-among-us.pdf [+] 2. http://www.indiegogo.com/iv-thicket http://www.indiegogo.com/iv-thicket + Read this paper if you want to get a general idea of how IV operates.
- MaysonL 14y ago
  http://stlr.stanford.edu/pdf/feldman-giants-among-us.pdf http://stlr.stanford.edu/pdf/feldman-giants-among-us.pdf
sytelus 14y ago
There is a strangely titled book written by one of the early Microsoft employee called "Barbarians Led by Bill Gates" which describes authors interactions with Myrvold. It's a very enlightening and entertaining book to learn more about how Myrvold works. One of the incidence in this book is as follows: Myrvold one day thinks of an idea that shadings in the picture can be compressed using electromagnetic equations. Basically look at the shading as charge field, solve EM equations to find what set of charge at which positions would produce that field. Then the position of charges becomes the description of the field. Trained eyes would immediately see issues here and discard this idea as naive version of optimization problem. However Myrvold probably has a patent on it.
javajosh 14y ago
You know what's worse than patent trolls gaming the system? It's all of those people in the world who say, "Yeah, IV is smart. They've found a loophole and are exploiting it. Nothing to be done." Wrong. Who runs this place? You and me. And if enough of us want to change the law to put IV and it's clones out of business, we can do it. This place is our home, our nation, and we get to decide what's allowed here. Our biggest challenge is not IV, but all of those people in the world who give IV and people like them a nod, a kind of respect, an admiring acknowledgement that they've abused the system and gotten away with it. It's the same respect given to influential bankers in Wall St and London, it was the same respect given to Bush, the same respect given to wealthy men accused of rape and murder who never serve time. Any and every action taken against these entities seems to either melt away entirely or result in a slap on the wrist. Meanwhile people who hack celebrity emails get 10 years hard time. People making $20k a year get audited and go to prison. It is not okay. There is nothing to admire, and patent trolls are merely smug abusers of our society. Organizations that follow the letter of the law but ignore the principles behind them should inspire our strongest contempt. Their existence's only positive value is as a clarion call to vigorous action by our legislators to amend the law to close the gap between the letter and spirit. The longer we wait, the less legitimacy the rule of law has. Our elected officials, the people we keep voting into office cycle after cycle, are far more interested in playing their political games. They do have some time leftover to actually govern. But governing takes common sense, and whatever they have is shattered by lobbyists who's only job is to undermine common-sense with smooth-sounding arguments - or, if that doesn't work, threats of withdrawing campaign support. Our leaders are dazzled by arguments of complexity when the heart of the problem is genuinely, truly simple: Introduce and pass a bill to eliminate software patents, retroactively, and do it now.
- lifeisstillgood 14y ago
  I was reading an interview with Charlie Munger yesterday who was talking about why they gave Salmon Bros CEO the push in 1991 (he did not fire a trader who had been fraudulently trading). Munger said it was the same as when you find a little old lady with her hands in the till and she says it was the first time - you have to prosecute be aide if you don't it infects the whole system as corrupt The USA has been amazingly lucky in eventually prosecuting its corruption (boss tweed, al Capone) but it feels that it is slipping. Keep pushing
minhhuongohido 14y ago
like
minhhuongohido 14y ago
like
stelliosk 14y ago
Keyser Soze was either German or Turkish in the movie, the Hungarian mob were going to buy the only guy who could identify Keyser Soze from a group of Argentinians!
scanr 14y ago
I just had a thought. What if Myhrvold has realised that the only way that the patent system can be changed is if he brings innovation to a halt completely using Intellectual Ventures. Only he can't tell anyone because he believes that if he does, it will undermine his efforts. Yes. This is somewhat flippant. Hopefully his motivations aren't relevant and IV still acts as a catalyst for change. The real danger, I suppose, is regulatory capture. I wonder how much lobbying IV does.
- DannyBee 14y ago
  1. If Nathan believes that, he's been lying/hiding it from every person in the world, repeatedly 2. IV does a large amount of lobbying, particularly against bills that, for example, asked for patent damages to only be given in the amount the patented part was of the whole. IE In prior law, you used to be able to get damages as a royalty on the full price of the product, even if the infringed patent was in a 2 cent part of a $20,000 product IV lobbied heavily against this provision (I don't have an exact figure, but they are now within the top 5 money wise on patent issues and are always present at various conferences/testimony/etc ). Same with things like post-grant reexams, stronger obviousness protections, etc. Hey, but maybe that's part of the front! If they didn't lobby against helping the patent system, it would undermine their efforts to help the patent system because then we'd know they weren't genuine. Sorry, but all these conspiracy theories that Nathan really is trying to be helpful are hilarious. Some people just realize they can make money by exploiting the world, and Nathan is one of them.
larrys 14y ago
Actually I'm not sure what value you can get from this list at all. This is the methodology: "Then we tagged all of the companies that have links to attorneys and mailing addresses frequently used by Intellectual Ventures. The resulting list is about 2,000 companies. We have not verified that each and every company is definitely a shell corporation for Intellectual Ventures (doing so would be prohibitively expensive), but some obvious overlaps are apparent: managing corporations, telephone numbers, and other factors." Right off the top I'm noticing a number of the same addresses which are, in fact, addresses for well know companies in Delaware that register companies and corporations ("The Company Corporation" is one of them). I've used them. I'm not sure this information really provided is of much help. Most importantly, plainsite labeling this as a statement of fact "PlainSite exposes the Intellectual Ventures shell game." and the HN title "Plainsite Exposes 2000 IV Shell Companies" is clearly wrong (as a reading of the text I've quoted shows).
- jp--1 14y ago
  I would suggest the methodology make use of not only the assignments data from the patent offices but also the data from as many state company registries as possible. It's not easy because there is no harmonization of this type of data among all US states and some (Delaware, Nevada, etc.) deliberately make it easy for companies to hide information about who owns them. There's one more idea I had. You could also search trademark data under the assumption that short-lived shell companies do not register trademarks for their company name, unlike most legitimate businesses that offer products and services to society.

298 points by thinkcomp 14y ago

I don't care what anyone says, Aaron Greenspan you have once again impressed me... can't say the same for Zuckerberg. Well done. As for IV, I came across an amusing quote from their co-founder at a recent conference: he claimed, among other things, that 1. concerns about IV's consistent use of _cryptically-named_ shells[1] is a "red herring" and 2. for $80K any company could do a freedom-to-operate analysis on every claim in IV's entire portfolio. 1. You need not browse past page one of Aaron's list to get a taste of how descriptive the shell company names are. Take, for example, Aht Chu LLC. As the co-founder noted at the conference, thousands of shell companies with cryptic names are necessary because they make it easier for IV to segregate its IP assets. I suspect there might have some other advantages too. ;)

praptak 14y ago
> Take, for example, Aht Chu LLC. Ok, this convinced me that Myhrvold is just the biggest troll on Earth, I'm just worried he might have got too immersed in his role. "What the name of your company?" "Aht Chu" "Bless you! Now what's the name of your company?" "Aht Chu" "Awww, you seem to have a bad cold."

namank 14y ago

Company list: http://www.plainsite.org/tags/index.html?id=640 http://www.plainsite.org/tags/index.html?id=640

anigbrowl 14y ago
It's not possible to look at any page but the first one. Entering another number takes you to page with links to 24 hour Fitness and 3M Corporation. Also, clicking on the individual entries doesn't provide you with any evidence or a link to the USPTO record, just the company's mailing address. Sounded interesting, but all we've got here is the badly-presented output of a web scraping session.
- ChuckMcM 14y ago
  Hmm maybe we're not seeing the same thing this URI: //www.plainsite.org/tags/index.html?table=entitiestags&page=3&id=640 You can change the page=3 to any number between 1 and 44 to get more company names.
  - anigbrowl 14y ago
    Apparently it's been fixed so it works in the page now, but why on earth would I want to edit the URL as a navigation method?
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- eteasley 14y ago
  The page number field is working for me now.

damian2000 14y ago

He seems like a smart guy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Myhrvold http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Myhrvold ... wonder what made him turn his hand to patent litigation?

bryanh 14y ago
Money.
- sp332 14y ago
  Short but true. He has explained that, even though it doesn't really make sense, the current regulatory environment makes this business extremely profitable and it makes (business) sense to do it.
- batgaijin 14y ago
  I don't buy that... and he knows he's villifying himself in the tech industry. Perhaps I'm a bit of a romantic but I think he's doing it on purpose. If you know the game is rigged, and will have massive effects on the future of technological development, you have quite the motivation to show the flaws. To anyone doubting me: think about it. We all know IV, these connections to shell corporations are new but they are also inevitable. Why wouldn't they play it slower? Why wouldn't they make sure there was no overlap? These are technocrats; they know the smallest smudge can haunt them. Do you think the tracks were left by accident?
  - rdl 14y ago
    Arguably most of the tech industry (at least people over 25 or so) already hated him due to his role at Microsoft, so he's used to that. If he is actually engaged in a "long troll" against the patent industrial complex, then he's worthy of approximately every science and economics prize in the world. I just don't think that's his style, though.
  - smokeyj 14y ago
    I'm happy this guy exists. Sure, we can use logic to deduce ideas aren't property. But not until a troll comes around do the masses pay attention. I hope he makes a fortune making a mockery out of the mockery.

001sky 14y ago

I'd like to see the NY Times do investigative reporting like this.

NatW 14y ago
Agreed. NPR / This American Life did a great piece on Patent Trolls "When Patents Attack" (in case you missed it): http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/441/when-patents-attack http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/441/w...
- 001sky 14y ago
  I'm thinking more of the data analytics-heavy reporting, reviewing public records and making them more accessible, etc. Almost a new breed of thinking and approach to the subject matter.

paulsutter 14y ago

I'm fascinated by the vexatious litigant point. Would a lawyer here care to comment on that? Once found a vexatious litigant, an entity can no longer file suit in court. In California, for example, all it takes to be found a vexatious litigant is to file five unsuccessful lawsuits in seven years [1]. Could something similar be used to stop Intellectual Ventures somehow? I'd love to understand it. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vexatious_litigation#United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vexatious_litigation#United_Sta...

gottagetmac 14y ago
The provision you're referring to only applies to pro se litigants (people who represent themselves in court).
001sky 14y ago
A litigant though is a 'legal person'. if you have 2000 legal entities (ie, legally== persons), it seems to help you on the math. But your question still stands and is a good one. Its not clear what role a common "controling entity" would have, for example, on the ability of affiliates, spv's and relatives/children to file or be found 'vexatious' etc.[1] ________ [1] INAL, but I think this question should be answerable.
- rdl 14y ago
  While I'm generally against RICO as law, this seems like one case where it would be reasonable to apply.
grabeh 14y ago
Speaking in relation to the UK, a litigant would only be considered to be vexatious where a claim was considered to be without merit and was only being brought for the purpose of causing annoyance, which is a fairly high threshold to prove. With IV, the issue is that they at least have an arguable case that patents they hold have been infringed. I would therefore think that they would not approach the threshold of being considered a vexatious litigant. The problem is that the patents have been granted in the first place, and once granted, companies are free to use them as they please or at least argue their case. Of course, the same patents could be revoked in a court action but I acknowledge that the principal aim is to extract royalties from companies before the matter ever comes to court. On the California provision you mention, this contains certain caveats which would mean the person would be free to file as many suits as they wanted where the claim was of a sufficiently low value. Presumably the provision is designed to prevent the individual representing themself from continuously filing frivolous suits against companies claiming vast damages, arguably due to the chilling effect this might have on companies doing business.

batgaijin 14y ago

Now do bg3.

sidcool 14y ago

Can someone pls explain me what happened here?

charonn0 14y ago
Intellectual Ventures is a company who own the rights to large patent portfolios. Rather than use the patents to, say, make something useful, they sue or threaten to sue other companies. For various legal and PR reasons, they file suits using "shell" companies, a company wholly owned by Intellectual Ventures and which exists only or largely on paper. They are exploiting a vulnerability in the system for profit and at the expense of system resources, stability, and usefulness. There's no requirement that a private company disclose all the various names under which it operates, so the only way to list all the shell companies used by this one operation is to correlate thousands of public records held by the Patent Office to see which companies can be linked to Intellectual Ventures.
namank 14y ago
instead of using patents to invent new things, they use patents to sue people and make money.
- ahi 14y ago
  Which would only be sort of bad if the patents weren't shit.

rdl 14y ago

This is the kind of stuff I wish WikiLeaks did.

001sky 14y ago
Wanted: Wikileaks need a "growth hacker" for a new business line: Organize, Understand public avail information=D Jokes aside, it does takes some technical chop to get thru the garbage public records, apparently.

Elepsis 14y ago

At first glance, this list is a bit of a joke. Just on the first page you see Acco Brands (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACCO_Brands http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACCO_Brands) and Agere Systems (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agere_Systems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agere_Systems), which shows that not even the most rudimentary fact checking went into this effort. Unfortunate, because I think they're trying to add transparency in an area where it's badly needed. But using such a blatantly inaccurate methodology undermines pretty much everything they're trying to do.

mherdeg 14y ago
Tom Ewing's paper ( http://stlr.stanford.edu/pdf/feldman-giants-among-us.pdf http://stlr.stanford.edu/pdf/feldman-giants-among-us.pdf , datestamped Jan. 2012) says they've identified 1,276 shell companies, which is quite a bit lower than the 2,201 items listed by PlainSite. (In his interview with Ira Glass, broadcast in July 2011, Ewing said there's "very close to 1,300" shell companies, http://www.thisamericanlife.org/sites/default/files/TAL441_transcript.pdf http://www.thisamericanlife.org/sites/default/files/TAL441_t... , so I guess he's been working on this for a while.)

manhonest 14y ago

Other attempts at this task: 1. Google search: feldman-giants-among-us.pdf [+] 2. http://www.indiegogo.com/iv-thicket http://www.indiegogo.com/iv-thicket + Read this paper if you want to get a general idea of how IV operates.

MaysonL 14y ago
http://stlr.stanford.edu/pdf/feldman-giants-among-us.pdf http://stlr.stanford.edu/pdf/feldman-giants-among-us.pdf

sytelus 14y ago

There is a strangely titled book written by one of the early Microsoft employee called "Barbarians Led by Bill Gates" which describes authors interactions with Myrvold. It's a very enlightening and entertaining book to learn more about how Myrvold works. One of the incidence in this book is as follows: Myrvold one day thinks of an idea that shadings in the picture can be compressed using electromagnetic equations. Basically look at the shading as charge field, solve EM equations to find what set of charge at which positions would produce that field. Then the position of charges becomes the description of the field. Trained eyes would immediately see issues here and discard this idea as naive version of optimization problem. However Myrvold probably has a patent on it.

javajosh 14y ago

You know what's worse than patent trolls gaming the system? It's all of those people in the world who say, "Yeah, IV is smart. They've found a loophole and are exploiting it. Nothing to be done." Wrong. Who runs this place? You and me. And if enough of us want to change the law to put IV and it's clones out of business, we can do it. This place is our home, our nation, and we get to decide what's allowed here. Our biggest challenge is not IV, but all of those people in the world who give IV and people like them a nod, a kind of respect, an admiring acknowledgement that they've abused the system and gotten away with it. It's the same respect given to influential bankers in Wall St and London, it was the same respect given to Bush, the same respect given to wealthy men accused of rape and murder who never serve time. Any and every action taken against these entities seems to either melt away entirely or result in a slap on the wrist. Meanwhile people who hack celebrity emails get 10 years hard time. People making $20k a year get audited and go to prison. It is not okay. There is nothing to admire, and patent trolls are merely smug abusers of our society. Organizations that follow the letter of the law but ignore the principles behind them should inspire our strongest contempt. Their existence's only positive value is as a clarion call to vigorous action by our legislators to amend the law to close the gap between the letter and spirit. The longer we wait, the less legitimacy the rule of law has. Our elected officials, the people we keep voting into office cycle after cycle, are far more interested in playing their political games. They do have some time leftover to actually govern. But governing takes common sense, and whatever they have is shattered by lobbyists who's only job is to undermine common-sense with smooth-sounding arguments - or, if that doesn't work, threats of withdrawing campaign support. Our leaders are dazzled by arguments of complexity when the heart of the problem is genuinely, truly simple: Introduce and pass a bill to eliminate software patents, retroactively, and do it now.

lifeisstillgood 14y ago
I was reading an interview with Charlie Munger yesterday who was talking about why they gave Salmon Bros CEO the push in 1991 (he did not fire a trader who had been fraudulently trading). Munger said it was the same as when you find a little old lady with her hands in the till and she says it was the first time - you have to prosecute be aide if you don't it infects the whole system as corrupt The USA has been amazingly lucky in eventually prosecuting its corruption (boss tweed, al Capone) but it feels that it is slipping. Keep pushing

minhhuongohido 14y ago

stelliosk 14y ago

Keyser Soze was either German or Turkish in the movie, the Hungarian mob were going to buy the only guy who could identify Keyser Soze from a group of Argentinians!

scanr 14y ago

I just had a thought. What if Myhrvold has realised that the only way that the patent system can be changed is if he brings innovation to a halt completely using Intellectual Ventures. Only he can't tell anyone because he believes that if he does, it will undermine his efforts. Yes. This is somewhat flippant. Hopefully his motivations aren't relevant and IV still acts as a catalyst for change. The real danger, I suppose, is regulatory capture. I wonder how much lobbying IV does.

DannyBee 14y ago
1. If Nathan believes that, he's been lying/hiding it from every person in the world, repeatedly 2. IV does a large amount of lobbying, particularly against bills that, for example, asked for patent damages to only be given in the amount the patented part was of the whole. IE In prior law, you used to be able to get damages as a royalty on the full price of the product, even if the infringed patent was in a 2 cent part of a $20,000 product IV lobbied heavily against this provision (I don't have an exact figure, but they are now within the top 5 money wise on patent issues and are always present at various conferences/testimony/etc ). Same with things like post-grant reexams, stronger obviousness protections, etc. Hey, but maybe that's part of the front! If they didn't lobby against helping the patent system, it would undermine their efforts to help the patent system because then we'd know they weren't genuine. Sorry, but all these conspiracy theories that Nathan really is trying to be helpful are hilarious. Some people just realize they can make money by exploiting the world, and Nathan is one of them.

larrys 14y ago

Actually I'm not sure what value you can get from this list at all. This is the methodology: "Then we tagged all of the companies that have links to attorneys and mailing addresses frequently used by Intellectual Ventures. The resulting list is about 2,000 companies. We have not verified that each and every company is definitely a shell corporation for Intellectual Ventures (doing so would be prohibitively expensive), but some obvious overlaps are apparent: managing corporations, telephone numbers, and other factors." Right off the top I'm noticing a number of the same addresses which are, in fact, addresses for well know companies in Delaware that register companies and corporations ("The Company Corporation" is one of them). I've used them. I'm not sure this information really provided is of much help. Most importantly, plainsite labeling this as a statement of fact "PlainSite exposes the Intellectual Ventures shell game." and the HN title "Plainsite Exposes 2000 IV Shell Companies" is clearly wrong (as a reading of the text I've quoted shows).

jp--1 14y ago
I would suggest the methodology make use of not only the assignments data from the patent offices but also the data from as many state company registries as possible. It's not easy because there is no harmonization of this type of data among all US states and some (Delaware, Nevada, etc.) deliberately make it easy for companies to hide information about who owns them. There's one more idea I had. You could also search trademark data under the assumption that short-lived shell companies do not register trademarks for their company name, unlike most legitimate businesses that offer products and services to society.