World's leading patent troll sues Motorola over Android phones
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Patents are chum in the business world, and they attract sharks.
That being said the cognitive dissonance of the loop here (Google -> MMI <- IV <- Google) suggests to me a complete breakdown of sanity.
Disclaimer: I am employed by MS, in an unrelated area.
You don't have to have a deliberate "conspiracy" (a word that often seems used to dismiss reasonable explanations of events) to have people with power using their influence to get other people with power to do things for their benefit (like file proxy lawsuits a la SCO). Their past behavior is in line with nextparadigms's comment.
"Intellectual Ventures was founded in 2000 by Nathan Myhrvold and Edward Jung of Microsoft as a private partnership. It lists Peter Detkin of Intel, and Gregory Gorder of Perkins Coie, a Seattle-based law firm as co-founders. They reportedly have raised over $5 billion from many large companies including Microsoft, Intel, Sony, Nokia, Apple, Google, SAP, Nvidia and eBay, plus investment firms such as Charles River Ventures. Reported statistics indicate over 30,000 purchased patents and applications[3] and over 2000 internally-developed inventions. Licenses to patents are obtained through investment and royalties.[4]"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_Ventures#Reference...
You're as sound in your logic as saying that because IV was founded by the author of Modernist Cuisine, it's obvious that the molecular gastronomy movement is responsible for Google's patent troubles.
http://www.jdsupra.com/post/documentViewer.aspx?fid=49803802...
Intellectual Ventures has no loyalty to anything but its own inventions.
edit: incidentally, the outcome of Microsoft v. i4i (and the parent lawsuit, i4i v. Microsoft) was an out-of-court settlement where Microsoft paid i4i $300 million, at the hazard of an injunction against selling Office in the United States: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I4i
Now if he'd just dissolve IV and concentrate on the cooking...
P.S. Here are some other interviews he has done with Rose over the years:
1998.02: http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/5101 [on Terraserver]
1998.06: http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/4849 [on Microsoft]
2004: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1186228177272865169 [first IV interview]
2010: http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/11022 [on IV]
2011: http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/11562 [Book Tour]
By all accounts he's remarkably accomplished and intelligent. To make everything worse, he's already impossibly rich. It's as if he's decided to just make the world a worse place because he can.
[1] " It's as if he's decided to just make the world a worse place because he can."
That makes him sound like the love child of an Ayn Rand ubermensch and an L. Ron Hubbard hero.
Ends do not justify means, etc
If they are there to protect inventors and allow profit from invention why can you sell them? If you fail to commercialize a product from an invention then the patent protection on it should be dropped. A company that buys a patent didn't invent, didn't innovate. Why should they get protection for someone elses work?
In such a case, it's often advantageous to join up with someone else, get investments, start a company, and sell your patents to that company.
That's just one way the ability to sell patents is a good thing.
For example, Google bought Motorola Mobility -- do they get those patents? What if they then spin off everything, but the patents? Can they do that? Whom do the patents stay with? Can I sell you my company, but not the patents? As an employee, when I grant my employer my patents, have I sold them? Etc...