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.
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.
http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2008/09/17/invention-capitalism-the...
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.