Nathan Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures hides lawsuits via 1000+ shell companies | Hacker News Reader

Nathan Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures hides lawsuits via 1000+ shell companies

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179 pointsmbrubeck47 comments

I remember reading a glowing profile a few years ago on Nathan Myhrvold and Intellectual Ventures(I believe it was on Wired), how they got together a bunch of big scientists and came up with cool new ideas (and then patented them, but that seemed fair to me at the time).

Seems that was just good PR back then, or possibly Mr. Myhrvold started out the business on the best of the intentions... till the cold hard reality of being able to make money by just sitting back, exploiting the broken patent system and extorting raised its appeal.

Has IV actually been responsible for something good? I do not ask this sarcastically(almost), what good deeds have they done?

The "glowing profile" you mention may have been this 2008 article in the New Yorker, by Malcolm Gladwell: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/12/080512fa_fact_...

My appreciation for Malcolm Gladwell's work took a major tumble at the publication of that article. We had enough sycophantic executive worship from Wired in the 90s to keep me immune to that sort of carefully packaged PR for a lifetime.

I don't think you read the article. The conclusion is that ideas are cheap. The dude was the ideas man.

When a company is seen as a bullshitting enterprise how is it sycophantic?

Yes, I read the article a few times since it was released.

A knowledgeable reader like you or I realizes the travesty of an organization of rich people sitting around dreaming up ideas so they can assign a team to document for patent. But you have to interpret the article to see that angle, because the extent of Malcolm Gladwell's interpretations are the problems of eponymous attribution and the message that "you can do it too", which comes off disingenuously:

"The unavoidable first response to Myhrvold and his crew is to think of them as a kind of dream team, but, of course, the fact that they invent as prodigiously and effortlessly as they do is evidence that they are not a dream team at all. You could put together an Intellectual Ventures in Los Angeles, if you wanted to, and Chicago, and New York and Baltimore, and anywhere you could find enough imagination, a fresh set of eyes, and a room full of Varleys and Pfaffs."

Yes, he's right, we can setup a patent mill too! (I know, that's not fair, he means that we could setup an invention workshop too, but that's not what we typically see I.V. as.)

On the other hand, there's Dean Kamen. Now that's an invention workshop! Bravo!

They're working on traveling wave reactors, a particularly slick kind of fast-neutron breeder reactor:

http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?ch=special...

Bill Gates mentioned this in his TED talk http://ufuk.posterous.com/news-alert-bill-gates-is-officiall.... Doesn't he have an affiliation with IV?

In Gladwell's article it says Gates is an investor.

I don't know if this qualifies, but there was an article about a mosquito-killing invention a few days ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=516916

This highlights one of the problems with the current patent system that I illustrate in my recent essay: How Law Shapes the Business Landscape, and a Patent Puzzle.

http://daniellefong.com/2010/02/11/how-law-shapes-the-busine...

Corporations with no assets and no technological liabilities can acquire patents and use them as weapons for extortion. There is no counterbalancing force. These corporations may be created and dissolved at will for an exploitative purpose: they need not ever invent, produce, or otherwise give back to the public: the initial impetus for the patent system in the first place.

The liquidity afforded to ideas that Intellectual Ventures claims to create might, in fact, create enough social good that the drain via litigation is mollified. Given that they've claimed to be pacifists here, the deception laid bare looks particularly evil.

"There is no counterbalancing force. "

There is a company offering an interesting service to fight patent trolls: http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/feb2010/tc201...

Good side project - shellcompanyfinder.com - up/downvote companies as potential shells, share information as to their true owner.

I could build this in a weekend. No, really.

Who is in? I'm in. Someone comes with me I'll go, but I have no interest in a lone wolf initiative.

I need a designer who knows HTML/CSS and someone who can help get the word out. I'll do all the programming, database design, security, and hosting.

Optimally, I'd like at least 3 people to be involved including myself. If two people, who are serious, decide to come along by midnight tonight, we'll post a link to review the site Monday morning.

Edit: The project has been started, see this post to contribute to a discussion about what the site will do. I have a data model there as well: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1135508

If people don't upvote/downvote, you could always pay a few bucks to get mTurkers to do it :)

Or just make it a stackexchange site (I kid! don't hurt me)

buy the domain name fast! :)

Okay, I now own shellcompanyfinder.com

ohh this is fun, i just bought it too (intending to donate it to the effort) and godaddy said the purchase was successful... wonder what will happen now...

update:

The following domain name has failed to be registered:

SHELLCOMPANYFINDER.COM

Error: SHELLCOMPANYFINDER.COM: cannot register - already registered

Interesting! I have always wondered what happened in cases like this. The godaddy checkout process is so long and tedious, by the time you actually pay, someone else could have gone through the process somewhere else. In this case, I used godaddy too.

I was starting to complain that the site is dead, then realized this is still an idea and a worthwhile one! Hope, someone(with thick skin, imagine what you will be going against) actually goes forth with it.

Well you obviously need to make a shell company then before starting ;-)

That has been patented within the last 24 hours by IV.

Their business practices were always dubious. The fact that they feel the need to hide them in this fashion says all there is to be said.

IANAL, so can somebody explain how this isn't considered racketeering (you pay IV for their promise not to sue you)?

Racketeering is the extortion of money under the threat of illegal violence: arson, injury, blackmail, etc. The payer has done nothing to harm the payee.

Patent trolling is the extortion of money under the threat of a legal action over a wrong done by the payer (ie, infringed on a patent).

If you hit me with your car, I can choose to sue your insurance company (you've paid them to take legal responsibility), or I can choose to accept a negotiated settlement from them.

Right, so then the definition of racketeering is starting to become inadequate, is the way I see it.

It is not racketeering, which concerns illegal behavior outside the law, but more closely resembles barratry, which is the use of the law to harass.

see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barratry

Racketeering is collecting money to not commit a crime. IV suing you would not be a criminal act.

Another reason we need the Pirate Party.

I'm sure I'll get a backlash here for supporting this guy, but the system he publicly advocates would be a much better functioning patent system than the current one.

Currently, the average lawsuit between a large and small company over an IP dispute is around $1.6M. The result is that only large companies can play the patent game, and will simply infringe on smaller companies.

If IV can level the playing field by aggregating these patents and taking on that lawsuit risk, that should theoretically reduce the likelihood (or at least the cost) of an IP lawsuit, making the system more efficient.

That's also the starting cost of a lawsuit between a big company and another big company. We are currently not moving forward with some development our customers are requesting because of a ludicrous patent held by a subsidary of a large company.

$1.6M for the lawsuit? Is it just a payment to lawyers? Why so expensive?

I'm a cookbook junkie and was looking forward to IV's 1500 page codification of molecular gastronomy. Then I saw this article and put two and two together. IV won't make enough money selling a cookbook to justify the expense of their kitchen and staff. I'll bet money it's all an exercise to patent cooking techniques. Cloaking it as a cookbook has allowed them to bring in some big names to help out. That's dirty pool.

In the book "Superfreakenomics", IV is shown to be actively developing insanely simple/improbable solutions for hurricanes (by cycling warmer ocean water with cooler water using tires and concrete), global warming (by pumping sulphur into the statosphere), and malaria (with female mosquito detecting lasers). The book protrayed them as developing prototypes for those "inventions", so patents seem fitting.

throw this guy in jail for the rest of his life and be done with it. no different than madoff. worse actually. he not only took money, but he also "took" knowledge + intellectual property.

That's pretty harsh and unobjective! I haven't read anything to suggest patent trolling is equivalent to a Ponzi-scheme. Furthermore, give the man benefit of the doubt. For a person who did a Post Doc with Stephen Hawking, it's difficult to believe he is absolutely lacking in ethics and morals.

For a person who did a Post Doc with Stephen Hawking, it's difficult to believe he is absolutely lacking in ethics and morals.

I can guarantee you that the selection process for Physics PhDs has nothing to do with ethics, morals, emotional stability, social skills, or anything else relating to character.

According to the article, I.V. demands cash "for a combined promise not to sue over those patents and (here's the sneaky bit) a bit of a pyramid scheme, where those in early supposedly get a cut of later deals."

I'm not sure that being smart and accomplished in science is a reliable predictor of ethics or morals.

yup, that's what i based it off of (being objective). It's also similar enough that he takes money from the big companies THEN goes back to sue them. I don't think it's being harsh either. I'm absolutely against throwing people in jail for dumb things that don't deserve the time. If we don't do something about patent trolls like this, things will continue to get even worse.

Being smart (studying under hawking) != having good morals.

He sounds more like someone with a "If I can do it under the law, it must be perfectly moral to do it" sort of personality.

It might be worse. Ponzi schemes just steal what we have. Patent trolling steals what we're going to have. It's like killing the cow to get a glass of milk.

Huh? When did being smart have anything to do with being moral?

I meant that if he was given the opportunity to work under Stephen Hawking, his research must have been impeccable and unquestionable. I think there is a good correlation between being ethical and being a good researcher.

That Torquemada believed fervently was little comfort to those burned. He probably has convinced himself that the more effectively he grubs money the better the economy goes; why, doesn't he see every day billion-dollar innovations like a laser targeting mosquitoes?

Your thinking so does not make it so.

I fail to see any reason why being a skilled researcher has any relevance to question of one's ethics. There's no logical connection between the two. A trivial case in point: according to social science research, conservatives -- under-represented in academia and thus less likely than liberals to be "skilled researchers" -- give more charity than liberals.

After controlling for income and excluding religious contributions (tithe)?

No more than a speculation. Try to follow the links...

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