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[News] Microsoft Criminal/Founder is Investing in Patent Trolls

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Elite idea factory’s biggest venture yet: safer and cheaper nuclear power
plants

,----[ Quote ]
| The concept, which Intellectual Ventures presented this summer to the 
| American Nuclear Society, would reduce the need for costly uranium enrichment 
| and reprocessing, cutting the risk of weapons proliferation. The firm has a 
| team of 30 engineers and scientists refining the concept, not to mention a 
| big-name backer: Bill Gates.    
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http://seattle.bizjournals.com/seattle/stories/2008/08/18/story1.html


Recent:

All Things D: Nathan Myhrvold, Founder of Intellectual Ventures

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| Calacanis had an interesting question: Is IV making an unethical land grab
| for patents? His answer was that he didn't know how to answer that question,
| except that people might complain if he has a lot of success, but no one was
| going to give him back his money. (Fair enough—B.L.)
|
| Guy from Intel asks if an unintended consequence of IV's patent action and
| speculation is that big companies would keep extending patents to protect
| them. Nathan says it's BS. Most companies are doing R&D with a little R and a
| BIG D. They need to put more into the research. If people know they can spin
| out inventions, like they do divisions, they'll be more likely to do more
| research.
|
| "If you're not doing something that is somewhat threatening to the apple
| cart, you're not doing something interesting."
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http://gizmodo.com/393841/all-things-d-nathan-myhrvold-founder-of-intellection-venturessue


Ideas Are Everywhere... So Why Do We Limit Them?

,----[ Quote ]
| Gladwell uses this to talk up what Myhrvold is doing, suggesting that
| Intellectual Ventures is really about continuing that process, getting those
| ideas out there -- but he misses the much bigger point: if these ideas are
| the natural progression, almost guaranteed to be discovered by someone sooner
| or later, why do we give a monopoly on these ideas to a single discoverer?
| Myhrvold's whole business model is about monopolizing all of these ideas and
| charging others (who may have discovered them totally independently) to
| actually do something with them. Yet, if Gladwell's premise is correct (and
| there's plenty of evidence included in the article), then Myhrvold's efforts
| shouldn't be seen as a big deal. After all, if it wasn't Myhrvold and his
| friends doing it, others would very likely come up with the same thing sooner
| or later.
|
| This is especially highlighted in one anecdote in the article, of Myhrvold
| holding a dinner with a bunch of smart people... and an attorney. The group
| spent dinner talking about a bunch of different random ideas, with no real
| goal or purpose -- just "chewing the rag" as one participant put it. But the
| next day the attorney approached them with a typewritten description of 36
| different inventions that were potentially patentable out of the dinner. When
| a random "chewing the rag" conversation turns up 36 monopolies, something is
| wrong. Those aren't inventions that deserve a monopoly.
`----

http://techdirt.com/articles/20080507/0114581051.shtml


In the Air

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| Nathan Myhrvold met Jack Horner on the set of the “Jurassic Park” sequel in
| 1996.
|
| [...]
|
| But then, in August of 2003, I.V. held its first invention session, and it
| was a revelation. “Afterward, Nathan kept saying, ‘There are so many
| inventions,’ ” Wood recalled. “He thought if we came up with a half-dozen
| good ideas it would be great, and we came up with somewhere between fifty and
| a hundred. I said to him, ‘But you had eight people in that room who are
| seasoned inventors. Weren’t you expecting a multiplier effect?’ And he
| said, ‘Yeah, but it was more than multiplicity.’ Not even Nathan had any idea
| of what it was going to be like.”
|
| The original expectation was that I.V. would file a hundred patents a year.
| Currently, it’s filing five hundred a year. It has a backlog of three
| thousand ideas.
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http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/12/080512fa_fact_gladwell/?currentPage=all


Related:

Who is the world's biggest patent troll?

,----[ Quote ]
| In two consecutive days, The Wall Street Journal presented two different
| answers. The first is not surprising: Intellectual Ventures, the brainchild
| of ex-Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold. It's now out "to raise as much as
| $1 billion to help develop and patent inventions, many of them from
| universities in Asia."  
`----

http://blogs.cnet.com/8301-13505_1-9816163-16.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20


Playing Microsoft Patent Poker

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| This time though, while Ballmer slinks away to try to con … convince people
| that Microsoft Unified Communications somehow offers people more than what
| Cisco's VOIP (voice over IP) been offering customers for years, a patent
| attack finally launches at Linux. Specifically, IP Innovation, a subsidiary
| of Acacia Technologies Group, has filed a patent infringement claim against
| Linux distributors Novell and Red Hat.    
|
| So was it just timing, or was it something more? Let's take a look at the
| players.  
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http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2201579,00.asp?kc=EWRSS03129TX1K0000616


Top Ten Patent Trolls of 2007

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| 3. Acacia. I didn't start tracking Acacia carefully until the summer. But
| still, on my blog I have reported on over two dozen lawsuits brought by
| Acacia this year, against more than 235 defendants. That's in addition to the
| over 200 lawsuits Acacia filed in previous years against hundreds and
| hundreds of defendants. And that's not including the two lawsuits (at least)
| Acacia has filed in December against 20 more defendants (yes, Acacia, I'm
| watching you). Acacia's business model, as a publicly traded company, is to
| accumulate patents and sue as many companies as possible in order to extract
| licenses. They have a market cap of over 275 million - that pays for a lot of
| lawsuits. Unlike other trolls, Acacia tends to not focus on one court in
| particular, although they have sampled the Eastern District of Texas more
| this year than in the past.
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http://trolltracker.blogspot.com/2007/12/top-ten-patent-trolls-of-2007.html
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