Apple declines to join Microsoft in funding patent troll Intellectual Ventures
gigaom.com
gigaom.com
One of the best measures we have against Mr. Myhrvold -- given that he seems interested in portraying himself as a public genius of some sort -- is to drag his name through the mud over this. He's not the guy who studied with Stephen Hawking. He's not the guy who wrote the molecular gastronomy tome. He's the very, very rich guy who wants to drag down the entire tech industry to get even richer.
"Pay your protection fees or else we're heading to the kangaroo courts of East Texas."
Certainly not the Nathan Myhrvold who is a professional jack-of-all-trades. After leaving Microsoft in 1999, he's been a world barbecue champion, a wildlife photographer, a chef, a contributor to SETI, and a volcano explorer. (http://www.ted.com/speakers/nathan_myhrvold)
You can't possibly be talking about the Nathan Myhrvold who proposed that we pump sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere from helium balloons to solve global warming, despite experts saying that it would reverse all the work we've done in the last 30 years to get sulfur dioxide out of the atmosphere. (http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0912/20/fzgps.01.html)
Although Google would make an industry outsider think differently, it's pretty much common knowledge within the tech industry that the guy is a complete piece of shit.
EDIT: Oh wait I forgot, HN isn't crawled.
Zakaria: How worried are you that the United States is no longer going to be the place that invents the future?
Myhrvold: I'm very worried. Current course and speed --- we're very good at inventing, uh, but we're also undermining our ability to do that in lots of ways.
<facepalm>
After several years (after Vista) of staying far away, I decided to give them a try once more with their Windows 7 phone. Totally abandoned and betrayed on that.
We need a major tech company like Apple to take a stand against these types of lawsuits before we will see any real policy change.
I can't imagine Apple counsel was very happy about that.
If anything Apple's stood in the way of patent trolls and threatened to inject themselves in any lawsuit filed for the Lodsys patent, making it much harder for Lodsys to win or back out.
They've been engaged in a patent war with Samsung, Google, et. al, but this is a whole different game. I'm not saying I approve of this, but they haven't been picking on little companies.
Microsoft, by contrast, is making hundreds of millions in license fees for questionable patents impacting Android devices.
It's Intellectual Ventures that was co-founded by two former senior Microsoft employees that's the worst offender by far.
Those companies that invested in IV probably did it for strategic reasons since barring that they'd probably end up targets.
I have no idea what he's up or why he was head-hunted to lil ol' NZ but an ex-IV guy in a major role in a central funding hub of an entire country's R&D system kind of weirds me out. My conspiracy tendencies are high normally, this takes it to 11. Any comments from a community that might have worked/interacted with him?
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockstar_Consortium
edit: reference
Does not compute.
That's absolutely what this is. Instead of being on the receiving end of a thousand lawsuits, you 'invest' in IV, which gives you a license to any and all of the patents they have and will acquire for some term after your investment.
It's a further optimization of the 'pay them to go away' method of dealing with patent trolls, as you're not paying each shell company for each patent, you just pay the parent company once.
It seems obvious it's worse for them in the long run, and they can afford to play the long game. Maybe I'm being naive about the costs at stake here.
Those getting hurt by the trolling, are smaller, potentially innovative, companies without patent war chests. But their hurt is measured in all the things that did not come to market; hence remain unseen, unmarketed, unpaid for, and therefore unable to pay for representation in a political system such as ours.
What Apple wants (And MS and Sony), is to be able to troll others, including former employees, who set up on their own. While preventing others from doing the same to them. Or, even simply have that particular sword hang over anyone who might want to market a product in competition with them, as well as those guys' potential investors.
That's the mantra, but if push comes to shove, about everyone negotiates with terrorists. It is good for your negotiation position if it the bad guys believe that you won't negotiate, though.
You don't negotiate with terrorists, because there's no real barrier to entry into terrorism. At its simplest, someone just needs a gun and a lot of nerve. There's no real competition to get a gun, they're fairly inexpensive, and there's no shortage of desperate people for whom such a payment represents the best near-term opportunity.
Patent trolling, however, has significant barriers to profitable pursuit. The only people who can likely get into it are already-wealthy professionals and there's not exactly a huge pool of those people, for whom such a pursuit represents the best near-term opportunity.
So the only people you're likely to 'encourage' are organizations like IV that are already doing it and are the exact same groups you're paying off with 'investments'.
Longer Explanation: To patent troll you need at least a patent and a patent attorney. But not just any patent will do -- you need one that allows you to assert rights over a fairly broadly-implemented technology, with a sufficiently-early priority date so as to stand up to an inexpensive search for prior art. And, unlike guns, those are currently in high demand, limited supply and there's generally direct competition to acquire them.
Competent patent attorneys aren't exactly growing on trees either. Particularly those who would take on the risk of this kind of business as opposed to pursing other IP work.
Beyond that, you need enough resources to plausibly survive a whole bunch of lawyerly conversations/negotiations with your targets and probably a patent trial or two. Even for the troll, a patent trial represents 1-2 million in fees. [1]
So what you really need are enough patents on fundamental technologies so that the small "licenses" add up faster than the legal/opportunity costs of your attorney(s), and still leave enough money for your own end to be worth-while.
And "enough patents" also implies "enough shell companies" to ensure that each individual suit doesn't carry a downside risk of ending your entire operation. [2]
So now you're looking at escalating attorney's fees for setting up these shells and rents on small offices for each, in a 'friendly' legal district.
Never mind that at any moment the US Supreme Court or Congress could step in and not only zero out your current portfolio's value, but could outright gut your entire business plan. [3]
So, quite unlike with terrorism, you can only really get into patent trolling if you're an already-wealthy professional who (for whatever reason) has no better prospects in a market and industry where basically everyone has better prospects.
The only people for whom it's a particularly plausible option, are those who either lucked into one or more particularly valuable patents, or someone who had already acquired a great number of such patents before the industry really recognized the value of patents in the hands of an NPE.
[1] Even if you partner with the attorney, their opportunity cost would have to be plausibly re-coup-able if they're going to go along with your business instead of just getting other clients. So it's not like the 'cost' can be ignored entirely.
[2] Without shell companies, if someone wins a judgement of attorneys fees, they're going to take your warchest and patent portfolio and you'll be done.
[3] That certainly doesn't seem likely any time soon. But it's a real, non-zero risk of wiping out your whole enterprise.
When they pay, they are getting rid of the problem and, at the same time, funding the troll that will hit their competition with similar lawsuits, making the competitors' lives more difficult and theirs easier. It's one of the only legal ways to spend money raising the entry barriers to your market.
Because we call them "patent trolls" but they aren't trolling. They do have legitimate (in the legal sense, not the technical) patents.
And they CAN (and have) make a big company pay in court for their perceived abuse of those patents.
IV's business model is this: Hire 30+ full time staff to do nothing but idea generation. They do some proof of concept to show off to journalist in attempt to clean their image as trolls but in reality they have no plans to make any products whatsoever. In addition they have 100s of other people which had previously included some well known researchers and experts to "generate ideas". All of these ideas becomes patent. They also but entire portfolios from other trolls.
So the name of the game is to some how collect 1000s of patents in just few years. That increases your potential target domain. Now you go to actual businesses and demand "protection money" like traditional mafias and gangs used to do. For a much lower "subscription" cost you can avoid multi-million dollar suits.
Another twist in the business plan is that the "member" companies can use IV's portfolio to attack non-members. Imagine Samsung using IV's patents against Google. That increases incentive to become member just because you don't want to be attacked by other members.
That's because IV itself is a parasite.
> While Apple invested in earlier IV funds, its reluctance to do so again may stem from the fact that it is being swamped by trolls itself
It is the wrong reason if you accept that patent trolling is wrong. Analogy: murder is wrong, so if someone only stops murdering people because their own family members were murdered, it would be the wrong reason.
It is also a bit of a guess to be honest, maybe they aren't getting a good return on investment or who knows maybe they just don't feel like investing in them any longer.
Corporations don't make decisions; they don't do anything at all. The people who control them do. "A corporation" isn't even a single abstraction; there are so many different kinds and even the same kind can be set up and run so many different ways that having any expectation (or lack thereof) of "a corporation" is meaningless.
A good result from bad intentions isn't admirable. A war economy can create jobs, among other things, but that result doesn't make going to war an admirable decision.
Nitpick - corporate leadership is responsible for the actions of those they lead.
Everyone knows what we're talking about when someone says "Microsoft did this" or "Y Combinator did that". It's a convenient shorthand that omits no useful information.
Nobody cares about the difference between an LLC and an S Corp and a Nonprofit when discussing corporate behavior (or lack thereof!) - their collective actions can and should still be critically evaluated through the same rubric.
The people that take those decisions are many and have various roles. The aggregate of them, we call a "corporation".
Think of it like an emergent entity. It's not just a person (e.g the CEO) making a decision all by himself. It's the whole leadership, the Board of directors, shareholders, the financial and market condition of the company, it's history etc.
In your logic, people don't take decisions and don't do anything either. Their brain does.
remember that not even patent trolls have tried to enforce design patents as IP before apple. They are really good at trolling. ALso, do not forgot job's emails to the RIM ceo during the valleygate.
They have agreements already so is not that is going to be a huge target anyway [1]
[1] http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/13/3239977/apple-and-microsof...
That said, this one act does not yet convince me that Apple learned its lesson. It's only a possibility.
Intellectual Ventures (IV) is seeking a major new investment to expand its controversial patent trolling operations but, unlike on past occasions, Apple is not coming along for the ride.
What's misleading about that? Did you read the article?
April 1 no more: https://www.facebook.com/NPR/posts/10202059501509428?stream_...
That said, my point still stands. The title does not accurately reflect the content of the article. A more accurate title would be "Apple declines to increase their funding for patent troll Intellectual Ventures"
Edited for more informative title
It just seems to me that you have difficulty accepting other commenter's criticisms and would rather just believe that you've been right all along. Why is it that many hackers have this superiority complex that causes them act like this? I see this type of scenario in our industry all the time. Hackers would rather see themselves as correct from a different angle rather than accepting fault seen from everyone else's perspective.
I'm not sure what is difficult to understand here about the main point that the title is inaccurate - there wasn't even an attempt to refute the explanation.
Yet Apple holds a $1Billion+ judgment on Samsung for violation of Apple's design patent for rectangular device with rounded corners in addition to "pinch and zoom" and "bounce back".
Trying to conflate a suit between Apple and Samsung with Patent Trolling is to rob the term of all meaning and essentially lump every action under "patents are bad".
Which is certainly as valid an opinion as any.
But such an opinion doesn't make any distinction between practicing entities and trolls, and as such it makes no sense to voice that opinion using a word that exists solely to make such a distinction.
You don't have to be an NPE to be a troll, or vice versa.
Though likely this is the commonly accepted definition, for all practical purposes this very naive definition. Perhaps not the case with Apple and the rectangular design, for purpose of legal protection, most patents are placed into entities that do nothing other than hold and license patents. (e.g. company A files patent 1, then assigns patent 1 to company A1 which in turn licenses it to company A the original inventor). This is elementary protection of intellectual property and legitimate; however, under your definition this makes company A1 a patent troll because the entity is non-practicing and only licenses and protects its patent.
According to the article Apple previously invested in IV patent funds, and those patent funds are non-practicing entities.
Conflating a specific lawsuit does not lump every action as "patents are bad" as I used a specific example based on the merits. And yes I admit it does not fall under your definition of troll, but I will continue to say a company is a troll who files, buys and enforces patents which are essential, obvious, and a copy of prior art already in the stream of commerce.
No, it's not. It's the actual definition that exists to draw a distinction between the unique situation posed by non-practicing entities and the added extortionate situation NPEs present, completely divorced from any concern as to whether their patents are particularly good, bad or whatever else.
If you want to say Apple has funded patent trolling, that's perfectly fine, because it's true. But that doesn't mean Apple's lawsuits against Samsung -- nor Samsung's against Apple -- are patent trolling.
> "Conflating a specific lawsuit does not lump every action as "patents are bad" as I used a specific example based on the merits."
You can certainly make a point about given actions being more or less conscionable on the merits. But even unconscionable actions simply are not trolling if they're undertaken by practicing entities.
If Apple were to fund IV and an IV subsidiary sues you, that's trolling, arguably by Apple, because you can't sue, threaten, cross-license, etc with Apple directly to make it go away.
If Apple were to sue you directly with the same hypothetical patent, that is not "trolling" because you can bring the typical array of legal strategies to the table.
The fact that propagandists have enough money to get heard shouldn't make them right.