Intellectual 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.
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?
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.
> I'm assuming their innocence until guilt is proven.
They are extortionists and vultures. Their business model is to buy cheap patents from people who just do pure research. Then they go and sue the pants off people who do real work and make a honest living by doing things that make real products.
So I don't know how you can say they need to be proven guilty when they plainly state what they are doing.
Again, have they sued anyone? Has any company/institution they've dealt with actually been wronged?
And, as far as the patent buying goes, I don't really see a moral hazard with arbitrage. Either the market for patents is really inefficient and they're reaping rewards for exploiting that, or they're actually (gasp) providing a service to the market by connecting companies to institutions, and they're being compensated for it. Either way, I'm thumbs up on the enterprise.
They don't make money hand-over-fist by being nice. Licensing the patent is the first step. If a company doesn't agree to license, then the IP firm sues. So far they have gone after those with the deep pockets or insufficient intestinal fortitude it takes to pay up when these bastards come knocking.
> Their business model is to buy cheap patents from people who just do pure research. Then they go and sue the pants off people who do real work and make a honest living by doing things that make real products.
Doing pure research isn't making an honest living?
People doing research make news. These guys make money. Let me know when you've heard of one of their groundbreaking discoveries that wasn't simply purchased from some professor somewhere.
Why is it bad to make money off of something purchased from a professor?
After all, if one can't make money off of a thing purchased from a professor, there's no reason to buy said thing from a professor. Is it wrong for professors to make money from what they invent? In many cases, the school also makes money. Is that wrong?
Or, is it just wrong for middlemen to buy and resell?
In other words, professors should only license to end users.
... this is getting confusing. Isn't Intellectual Ventures your run-of-the-mill patent troll? Don't invent anything worthwhile, acquire patents, sue companies that get stuff done?...
No lawsuits yet, but this is apparently because strong-arm tactics are more cost-effective. Here's an article suggesting that IV is hitting up companies for stuff they were already doing:
Myhrvold told the WSJ that he acknowledges facing resistance from companies he targets for licenses. But his patent inventory gives him leverage to extract settlements without litigation. "I say, 'I can't afford to sue you on all of these, and you can’t afford to defend on all these,'" he said.
It sounds like IV's general strategy is a carpet-bombing approach -- coming up with so many tangentially related patents that it doesn't matter how many are invalid, because proving it would cost too much in legal fees, lost sales, or investor confidence.
If you assume IV is legitimately innovating, then all these companies must have been willfully violating multiple patents (directly implementing them from the patent documents)... because otherwise these companies have all come up with the same innovations independently, and the frequency with which this occurs implies that the innovations are actually "obvious to someone skilled in the field" and hence not patentable.
