PlainSite Exposes 2,000 Intellectual Ventures Shell Companies
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Wrong. Who runs this place? You and me. And if enough of us want to change the law to put IV and it's clones out of business, we can do it. This place is our home, our nation, and we get to decide what's allowed here. Our biggest challenge is not IV, but all of those people in the world who give IV and people like them a nod, a kind of respect, an admiring acknowledgement that they've abused the system and gotten away with it. It's the same respect given to influential bankers in Wall St and London, it was the same respect given to Bush, the same respect given to wealthy men accused of rape and murder who never serve time. Any and every action taken against these entities seems to either melt away entirely or result in a slap on the wrist. Meanwhile people who hack celebrity emails get 10 years hard time. People making $20k a year get audited and go to prison.
It is not okay. There is nothing to admire, and patent trolls are merely smug abusers of our society. Organizations that follow the letter of the law but ignore the principles behind them should inspire our strongest contempt. Their existence's only positive value is as a clarion call to vigorous action by our legislators to amend the law to close the gap between the letter and spirit. The longer we wait, the less legitimacy the rule of law has.
Our elected officials, the people we keep voting into office cycle after cycle, are far more interested in playing their political games. They do have some time leftover to actually govern. But governing takes common sense, and whatever they have is shattered by lobbyists who's only job is to undermine common-sense with smooth-sounding arguments - or, if that doesn't work, threats of withdrawing campaign support. Our leaders are dazzled by arguments of complexity when the heart of the problem is genuinely, truly simple:
Introduce and pass a bill to eliminate software patents, retroactively, and do it now.
The USA has been amazingly lucky in eventually prosecuting its corruption (boss tweed, al Capone) but it feels that it is slipping.
Keep pushing
"Introduce and pass a bill to eliminate software patents, retroactively, and do it now." --- agreed, 100%
Even more frustrating than the current situation is the fact that it's likely to continue for the forseeable future unless we do something about patent trolls. As hinted at in the original article, the legislation in progress now is pretty much useless and not going to make much difference at all as far as trolling is concerned. Far more powerful stuff is needed.
Aside: it's mentioned in that article that if IV personally filed all its suits, the courts would likely consider it a vexatious litigant. If so, shouldn't the cheap gimmick of using shell companies to get around this be seen through and ruled ineffective by the courts?
And who establishes these principles? To suggest that an organization must additionally follow some ambiguous set of principles putatively inspiring an established law is the pinnacle of arrogance. How can a country function if its members (citizens and organizations alike) cannot look to the letter of the law to decide whether their conduct conforms therewith?
If you don't like the fact that some companies are legally engaging in contemptuous behavior, then change the law. That's the whole point of Congress--to legislate. Suggesting that laws additionally be subject to motivating principles comports with judicial supremacy, which is to say it's the courts (rather than our elected officials) who decide what the law is. That's not how this country is supposed to work.
Social pressure can later be codified into a legal solution, but in some cases the rules are necessarily ambiguous and resist codification, in which case social pressure is the next best thing.
I disagree, though. They're following the law as written, which the vast majority of people and organizations do daily. The distinction is that by doing so, they've found a "bug" in the system, and that's something that deserves admiration rather than contempt. Here's the analogy: someone spots a bug in a program, and they're exploiting that bug in a way that's harming other users. Who deserves those users contempt more: (1) the hacker who found & exploits the bug; or (2) or the quiescent software developer who fails to timely patch that bug? I think it's (2), which is why I'm reluctant to socially punish NPEs. They're publicizing flaws in patent legislation to the detriment to many innocents. Consider this akin to "crowdsourcing" Congress, subject to a cost function (namely, the magnitude of harm suffered by the innocents). It's Congress' continued inaction that deserves the magnitude of our contempt; socially vilifying the 'hacker' is just a band-aid solution.
Exactly the point of the OP. Thanks for not helping.
However, the analogy is flawed because if you find a loophole in the law and it is discovered you are usually not liable. If, however, you find a "bug" in an inadequately secured system you are still likely to be liable for exploiting it. Similarly, if you find physical security exploit in a building (a broken window, unlocked) you can still liable for taking advantage of it (trespassing, etc).
However, you point was about "admiration" vs. "contempt." This is obviously a matter of opinion, but I don't share admiration for hackers who take advantage "exploits" without at least attempting to report or taking some other "good faith" action. Neither writing software nor governing a society is easy. Finding and reporting "bugs" is a helpful and productive activity, exploiting "bugs" is not.
I'll detail the analogy more in another comment below.
That was the main thrust of what I wrote! So what's with all the other angry stuff? I am honestly confused by the rest of your post.
If the banks found a loophole in mortgage regulations that allowed them to take the houses of people who were paying, should we admire them for finding a bug, or vilify them for taking people's houses?
You seem (in this post and another) to think we should be doing the former. I believe it is the latter, or at worst, both.
The idea that we should admire NPE's in some fashion because they are doing Congress's job (which they aren't, btw), rather than vilify them, is, well, crazy.
You're ignoring the probability that banks would find such a a loophole. The U.S. subprime mortgage crisis was an indirect example, but allocating the majority of blame to the banks is not appropriate. They acted rationally assuming perfect information (an assumption that's usually necessary in the economic models they used in evaluating creditworthiness), so if anything, they deserve criticism for failing to appreciate the significance of, and potential for, imperfect information. But that issue isn't really relevant here.
It might be a fundamental difference in our opinions, but I'm inclined to believe that the purpose of the law is to avoid situations requiring "social justice." These companies are playing by the rules, but it's the rules that are flawed. So I prefer to spend my time focused on the root cause of our outrage.
You're ignoring the fact that banks lobbied to have Glass-Steagall repealed in the first place :) In computer term, you could say they used privilege escalation to create this loophole. And considering the amount of cash NPEs make, they're probably doing whatever they can to ensure the statu quo remains.
Now, you may very well argue that they are acting rationally, and they certainly are. But they do not exist in a vacuum. They are also acting outside of a moral framework, and harming the interests of the majority. There is little difference between the mob asking asking a small business for protection money, or a patent troll getting a settlement out of a small business for an overly broad patent: in both cases, it's extortion. Why shouldn't they be vilified, just like SCO was vilified back when it had the same business model? These people add nothing of value to the world, they actually try to subtract value.
You can argue there is a problem with Congress if it allows lobbies to write laws. But it would be exactly like blaming an official for accepting an unsolicited bribe, but not the person doing the bribing (which in real life would receive the harshest punishment).
| They acted rationally assuming perfect information.
I credit Bush with one thing though: I never identified strongly as an American before his presidency. Before Bush I never really stopped to think what being American meant, I just took it for granted, and it only made sense to me when, one by one, the tenets that had been so strongly ingrained in me, beliefs that I didn't even know were there, were taken away. Americans don't torture people. We don't initiate wars (well, we do, but not on my watch). We don't imprison people indefinitely without trial. We don't invade people's privacy without a warrant. We don't degrade and demean our citizens for security theater.
And we don't let people who produce nothing but paperwork extort money from those who create real wealth.
You should ask yourself what exactly you want to accomplish here, because nothing will be accomplished here. So if that's true, then ask yourself, "Why am I spending time making these posts?"
If you examine your reasoning, you'll be forced to conclude that you spend your time on this because it makes you feel good, and for no other tangible reason.
So, if that's true, then a better question to focus on is "Why do we choose to be ineffective?"
Does stating that do any good, or help anyone other than me? Our sick culture of power makes modern venality feel like a scary, dark, unknowable trend that came out of nowhere and has no source and no solution. Connecting Bush makes it feel more like a normal (if unwanted) social trend that has ordinary, identifiable roots and solutions. I think we consistently underestimate the presidential influence on other leaders--perhaps because in our sophistication such influence feels cliche. But I believe that his effect was real, it is lasting, and it will take a long time and a great deal of effort to heal those wounds. Sharing that hypothesis is fundamentally hopeful - if we know what happened, we can fix it.
And I like fixing things.
I also would argue that this is the basis for many disruptive innovations and startups like Uber or Airbnb would have had a hard time growing up in stronger regulated environments. Of cause this doesn't change the fact that patent trolls are a menace to innovation.
Unfortunate, because I think they're trying to add transparency in an area where it's badly needed. But using such a blatantly inaccurate methodology undermines pretty much everything they're trying to do.
(In his interview with Ira Glass, broadcast in July 2011, Ewing said there's "very close to 1,300" shell companies, http://www.thisamericanlife.org/sites/default/files/TAL441_t... , so I guess he's been working on this for a while.)
Once found a vexatious litigant, an entity can no longer file suit in court. In California, for example, all it takes to be found a vexatious litigant is to file five unsuccessful lawsuits in seven years [1]. Could something similar be used to stop Intellectual Ventures somehow? I'd love to understand it.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vexatious_litigation#United_Sta...
With IV, the issue is that they at least have an arguable case that patents they hold have been infringed. I would therefore think that they would not approach the threshold of being considered a vexatious litigant.
The problem is that the patents have been granted in the first place, and once granted, companies are free to use them as they please or at least argue their case. Of course, the same patents could be revoked in a court action but I acknowledge that the principal aim is to extract royalties from companies before the matter ever comes to court.
On the California provision you mention, this contains certain caveats which would mean the person would be free to file as many suits as they wanted where the claim was of a sufficiently low value. Presumably the provision is designed to prevent the individual representing themself from continuously filing frivolous suits against companies claiming vast damages, arguably due to the chilling effect this might have on companies doing business.
________
[1] INAL, but I think this question should be answerable.
As for IV, I came across an amusing quote from their co-founder at a recent conference: he claimed, among other things, that 1. concerns about IV's consistent use of _cryptically-named_ shells[1] is a "red herring" and 2. for $80K any company could do a freedom-to-operate analysis on every claim in IV's entire portfolio.
1. You need not browse past page one of Aaron's list to get a taste of how descriptive the shell company names are. Take, for example, Aht Chu LLC. As the co-founder noted at the conference, thousands of shell companies with cryptic names are necessary because they make it easier for IV to segregate its IP assets. I suspect there might have some other advantages too. ;)
Ok, this convinced me that Myhrvold is just the biggest troll on Earth, I'm just worried he might have got too immersed in his role.
"What the name of your company?"
"Aht Chu"
"Bless you! Now what's the name of your company?"
"Aht Chu"
"Awww, you seem to have a bad cold."
One of the incidence in this book is as follows: Myrvold one day thinks of an idea that shadings in the picture can be compressed using electromagnetic equations. Basically look at the shading as charge field, solve EM equations to find what set of charge at which positions would produce that field. Then the position of charges becomes the description of the field. Trained eyes would immediately see issues here and discard this idea as naive version of optimization problem. However Myrvold probably has a patent on it.
I think with Intellectual Ventures he saw an opportunity to make a lot (more) money within the legal framework of the United States, and despite already having a great deal of money, he simply seized the opportunity. Money is nice, and more money is nicer. It's doubtful that he feels anything like remorse for the destruction his company has inflicted on the nation's innovators. No doubt he sees himself simply as a shrewd businessman who saw an opening and took it.
One of his rationalizations, if he is ever bothered to make one, might be, "Well, if I wasn't doing this someone else would be." Of course, that is true.
It's one of those times when I wish we lived in smaller communities, where people like Nathan would have to deal with the ire of the community - to look people in the eye, to see the hatred and the anger that his actions are causing. Barring that, the AIA is not enough, and we need legislation to put IV and it's ilk out of business for good. E.g. let's turn that hatred and anger that Myrvold never sees (and probably wouldn't care about if he did) into real political action to take his weapons away from him.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernist_Cuisine
Just begs the question, though. Doesn't this guy have something better to do? Dunno.
Myhrvold started buying equipment for the research kitchen in the Intellectual Ventures lab. Much of the equipment was standard cooking equipment, but it also included items such as rotor-stator homogenizers, ultrahigh-pressure homogenizers, freeze-dryers, a 50 G centrifuge,[1] ultrasonic baths, and rotary evaporators.[9] The laboratory already included other high-tech and industrial equipment,[10] a 100-ton hydraulic press,[10] a large water-jet cutter, an electrical discharge machine, and automated milling machines.
I can see the connection with Heston Blumenthal in terms of the science of cooking etc.
Myhrvold and Wayt Gibbs, an executive editor at Intellectual Ventures who served as the editor-in-chief and project manager for the book, also started hiring writers and editors, research assistants, photo editors, and an art director. First hired was Chris Young, who had just stopped his work of leading the development kitchen in Heston Blumenthal's restaurant The Fat Duck in England.
He'd need to have a long handlebar moustache and tie heroines to railroad tracks to be more of a cartoon villain stereotype.
Why would that be true? Nobody else is doing it at the scale of IV, despite nothing preventing it from happening. It's not because other people are capable of bad choices that you are excused for your own blunders. Ethics don't work that way.
Now that they are bringing in revenue a business person might see things differently; maybe IV looks like a sensible investment. But trolling is still trolling. As with a law firm, they rely on the patent system to make money yet they produce nothing. They rely on fear of litigation to drive their "business". How long can they keep up the charade?
1. Interestingly, he's no stranger to frivolous patent litigation either. However like his museum, his attempts at bogus-patent-based extortion failed.
Boy, you couldn't be more wrong. IV has raised $5.5 billion[0] from the likes of[1]:
* Adobe
* Amazon.com
* American Express
* Apple
* Cisco Systems
* Detelle Relay KG
* eBay, Inc.
* Microsoft
* Nokia
* Nvidia
* OC Applications Research
* SAP
* Sony Corp.
* TR Technologies
* Verizon
* Xilinx
* Yahoo
* Brown University
* Cornell University
* Grinnell College
* Mayo Clinic
* Northwestern University
* Stanford University
* University of Minnesota
* University of Pennsylvania
* University of Southern California
* University of Texas
* Allen SBH
* Bush Foundation
* Charles River Ventures
* Commonfund Capital Venture Partners
* Dore Capital
* Flag Capital
* Flora Family Foundation
* Hewlett Foundation
* Howard Hughes Medical Institute
* Legacy Ventures
* McKinsey and Co.
* Next Generation Partners
* Noregin Assets
* Reading Hospital
* Rockefeller Foundation
* Roldan Block NY
* Seqouia Holdings
* Skillman Foundation
* Sohn Partners
* Taichi Holdings
* TIFF Private Equity
* White Plaza Group
There seems to be a misunderstanding of who Intellectual Ventures are. Most people didn't know about them before the NPR stories that portrayed them as patent trolls (they are), but they are also well known as researches, as hiring a large number of great inventors and notable scientists, filing hundreds of their own patents for technologies developed in house, for inventing the mini-nuclear reactor that was spun out as Terrapower, for stratoshield - a proposed solution to global warming as featured in Freakanomics, for their mosquito gun based on star wars tech, for their battery research and also for making deals with over a hundred universities around the world for a right of first refusal on all new inventions.
They aren't only patent trolls, there is a lot more to the company - $1B p.a in revenue
IV started as an ideas/inventions marketplace. Myhrvold went to all of the large tech companies and pitch them on setting up a fund that would be like an OPEC for patents. Instead of each company individually fighting patent battles, they would invest in IV and that would give them access to an arsenal to help defend themselves. This did come from his experience with patents at Microsoft.
IV then went out and raised funds in a way similar to what VCs do - but instead of investing into tech companies they actively buy up patents and inventions on behalf of their fund LP's (Microsoft, Apple, etc. listed above). It is a way for these companies to defend themselves from patents and to outsource part of their R&D.
IV has purchased over 30,000 patents across their funds, have applied for another 2,000 or so themselves, have a network of 4,000 inventors in their marketplace and actively seek out inventors on their website[2].
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_Ventures#Overview
[1] http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2011/05/intellectual-venture...
[2] http://www.intellectualventures.com/index.php/inventor-netwo...
There is a pre-history of IV, before they had a website with press releases that can be cut and pasted into comments. None of those companies were signed on from day one, when IV's portfolio did not yet exist and was just an idea.
Is that what you are suggesting?
What I am suggesting is that IV is not a rogue actor - they behave in the way they do with the consent, blessing and backing of many famous technology companies. They have, from all outward appearances, a very legitimate and profitable business model.
The term "patent troll" came from an in-house lawyer for a large well-known IT company.
The idea is that small inventors or small companies sometimes with the help of NPE's or aggressive litigators would come after the large companies and ask them to "pay up".
Of course the reality is often that large companies are the only ones who are capable of practising the technology in these patents and actually producing products and services that people use. So to the large company with lots of cash, these threats are just trolling. The small guys, the NPE's and aggressive patent litigators trying to shake down the large companies don't produce anything. All they did was file receive a few (likely bogus) software patents. They are "patent trolls".
Now, obviously the definition has expanded, but now you know where it came from and the context.
Next an ex-MS CTO with considerable personal wealth has become so bothered by this (or intrigued, take your pick) that he decides instead fo trying to fix the system and solve this problem of trolling, he will stick himself into the space that the NPE's and the aggressive patent litigators occupy. He will be a middleman. The new middleman. One middleman to rule them all. And he will take his cut. They'll be no need to produce products. Of course, there's one problem with this idea. He does not have control of 100's or 1000's of patents.
Now, what nik seems to be missing is that no business is going to donate money or patents to an aspiring mega troll. Large companies don't want to pay unless they have to; if there's no litigation threat then there's no reason to pay. Small inventors, universities, NPE's, etc. OTOH want payment; they are not going to donate their patents into a trolling pool without cash up front or some guarantee of payment. And as for VC, at the time, they had better things to invest in, and still do. One could argue they like the small guy with a great story and huge potential, not some tax collector on innovation that is by and large just a group of patent lawyers with no intention of producing anything.
_Our mega troll had to use his own money to get this idea off the ground._ He had to create a threat, a pool of patents that would otherwise be worthless on their own, by spending _his own money._ If this is such a savvy business idea then why did he have to take on the risk personally? And why isn't every wealthy geek jumping on the bandwagon and launching an IV clone? Why bother making products? Why not just be a middleman that produces nothing? I'll leave those questions for the reader. Here's a hint: Because no one, other than the trolls themselves, wanted to exacerbate an already vexing problem.
Of course, to the troll, the system is not broken. To the troll bogus software patents are currency. The only problem the troll has is getting people to pay for his worthless patents; our mega troll does this only by aggregating them into an impenetrable thicket (much larger and broader than any previsouly existing NPE) of remote potential infringement suits and hiding behind ephemeral shell corporations. It's worthless currency that would otherwise be ignored by anyone producing products and offering services (as his former employer routinely did), unless you threaten to sue them.
As with the software bug analogy in an above comment, what the IV founder did was to become part of the problem, inserting himself into the chain of contributors, in order to profit from it.
Perhaps I'm a bit of a romantic but I think he's doing it on purpose. If you know the game is rigged, and will have massive effects on the future of technological development, you have quite the motivation to show the flaws.
To anyone doubting me: think about it. We all know IV, these connections to shell corporations are new but they are also inevitable. Why wouldn't they play it slower? Why wouldn't they make sure there was no overlap?
These are technocrats; they know the smallest smudge can haunt them. Do you think the tracks were left by accident?
If he is actually engaged in a "long troll" against the patent industrial complex, then he's worthy of approximately every science and economics prize in the world. I just don't think that's his style, though.
for a new business line: Organize, Understand public avail information=D
Jokes aside, it does takes some technical chop to get thru the garbage public records, apparently.
This is the methodology:
"Then we tagged all of the companies that have links to attorneys and mailing addresses frequently used by Intellectual Ventures. The resulting list is about 2,000 companies.
We have not verified that each and every company is definitely a shell corporation for Intellectual Ventures (doing so would be prohibitively expensive), but some obvious overlaps are apparent: managing corporations, telephone numbers, and other factors."
Right off the top I'm noticing a number of the same addresses which are, in fact, addresses for well know companies in Delaware that register companies and corporations ("The Company Corporation" is one of them). I've used them. I'm not sure this information really provided is of much help.
Most importantly, plainsite labeling this as a statement of fact "PlainSite exposes the Intellectual Ventures shell game." and the HN title "Plainsite Exposes 2000 IV Shell Companies" is clearly wrong (as a reading of the text I've quoted shows).
There's one more idea I had. You could also search trademark data under the assumption that short-lived shell companies do not register trademarks for their company name, unlike most legitimate businesses that offer products and services to society.
Sounded interesting, but all we've got here is the badly-presented output of a web scraping session.
//www.plainsite.org/tags/index.html?table=entitiestags&page=3&id=640
1. Google search: feldman-giants-among-us.pdf [+]
2. http://www.indiegogo.com/iv-thicket
+ Read this paper if you want to get a general idea of how IV operates.
They are exploiting a vulnerability in the system for profit and at the expense of system resources, stability, and usefulness.
There's no requirement that a private company disclose all the various names under which it operates, so the only way to list all the shell companies used by this one operation is to correlate thousands of public records held by the Patent Office to see which companies can be linked to Intellectual Ventures.
Yes. This is somewhat flippant. Hopefully his motivations aren't relevant and IV still acts as a catalyst for change. The real danger, I suppose, is regulatory capture. I wonder how much lobbying IV does.
2. IV does a large amount of lobbying, particularly against bills that, for example, asked for patent damages to only be given in the amount the patented part was of the whole.
IE In prior law, you used to be able to get damages as a royalty on the full price of the product, even if the infringed patent was in a 2 cent part of a $20,000 product
IV lobbied heavily against this provision (I don't have an exact figure, but they are now within the top 5 money wise on patent issues and are always present at various conferences/testimony/etc ). Same with things like post-grant reexams, stronger obviousness protections, etc.
Hey, but maybe that's part of the front!
If they didn't lobby against helping the patent system, it would undermine their efforts to help the patent system because then we'd know they weren't genuine.
Sorry, but all these conspiracy theories that Nathan really is trying to be helpful are hilarious. Some people just realize they can make money by exploiting the world, and Nathan is one of them.