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Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

Equally interesting is that one of Lodsys's targets is seeking discovery in Arizona of whether Lodsys is a cat's paw of Intellectual Ventures: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=201108171318536

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It is sad that you even need to 'seek discovery' to check such things. Why is it even possible to do business anonymously?

Why shouldn't it be? Private enterprise is private.

Corporations are creatures of the state and do not exist "naturally"

Private as in privately owned, not as in privacy. Why should a private business owner avoid personal responsibility?

What I do not understand: Google and Apple are both investors to Intellectual Ventures. So the dog is biting its own tail quite horrendously here.

Hedging?

Nothing requires their company to be ideologues against patents.

(except for "Don't be evil")

-- signed, an EFF member

Intellectual Ventures started as a sort of patent pool for small inventors, at least purportedly. The idea was, as a small inventor, you could pay IV or, I think, contribute patents, or some combination of both, and IV would protect you from patent litigation. They only recently started suing people through shell companies. I'm pretty sure most of those companies invested in IV before it started trolling, but I'm having trouble looking up the info. I'll edit later if I find anything.

I could be wrong, but I think IV's model was to pay inventors for patents that the inventor couldn't afford to enforce. IV then turns around and sells blanket licenses to companies in the portfolio market space.

Intellectual Ventures has way more than these couple patents. Google/Apple's user base is more important than these couple patents. They only have them to protect themselves, not to assert them, so invalidating them won't do anything.

I suspect that as a result of some out of court settlement with Intellectual Ventures, people are asked to invest. I also suspect that the best lawyers in the world - and apple and google have the best in the world - pick the fights they have a chance of winning. A similar example is http://www.iwf.org.uk/.

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