Symantec must pay $17M to Intellectual Ventures

It may have described itself as a "patent defense fund", and that technically might not have been a lie, with some twisting of the meaning of words. However, what was going on was that people paid IV, and in return got protection from being sued over patents. The only way that can work is either

1. You are paying to avoid being sued by IV, or

2. You are paying for IV to protect you from being sued.

In the first case, it's nothing more than a license fee, i.e., paying to avoid enforcement against you. In the second, IV can only protect you by cross-licensing patents or through assertion of its patents, so it's the same as 1 but with the threat against someone else.

To my knowledge 1 was the only thing done in practice, so IV was just like any other non practicing patent-holding entity, except for the "innovation" of aggregating massive amounts of patents all in one place, and claiming to have no interest in actually suing people - instead expecting everyone to happily pay them. I doubt many people actually believed that they would never sue anyone, and indeed, shortly after that claim the lawsuits started.

I don't think there was ever a doubt IV was a patent troll. Just bigger, and with some attempt at good PR.

In a past life, in the course of work I occasionally happened to hang out with experienced licensing executives. They were discussing Intellectual Ventures at one point (and this is 2007 or so), and apparently in those days IV claimed they would monetize patents without litigation. These executives sorta laughed at this, seeing it as a rather naïve hope. Their reasoning was pretty straightforward: there are always companies whose default response to licensing negotiations is "fuck off", and patents being essentially just a right to sue, litigation was inevitable. IV did go 10 years before beginning suing, but as was predicted, it did eventually happen.

The story I'm familiar with characterizes IV's business model as a way for firms to trade off the volatility of the pay-off for R&D work for a steady stream of recurring payments (or 1 lump sum). Through further analysis of the business model/incentive structure it's then not difficult to see that IV was always destined to become a patent troll.

One key issue IV always had was scaling. How could you scale a business based on technical patents without incurring linearly increasing labor costs? Well, you seek out activities that yield the biggest bang for your buck. In other words, opportunistically target companies for a patent troll shakedown.

Yes, it's true. Patent defense is why Google initially invested. However, once they started enforcement, Google withdrew all further support.[1]

[1] http://www.geekwire.com/2014/apple-microsoft-patent/

Anyone who invents something and then patents and licenses it without owning the factory is a patent troll the way you're defining it.

The problem is that the patents modern trolls abuse are garbage patents that don't promote innovation. Some are overbroad or obvious. Most are directed to math and computer software, a field totally incompatible with the patent system. Over 90% of programmers with an opinion prefer only copyright and trademarks to apply to computer software.

The patent lawyers were thirsty to bleed software companies dry and pushed their system where it isn't wanted and now we have to suffer the consequences of having little influence in Washington to defend ourselves.

It really isn't that simple. Inventors need a way to protect their ideas. I think we need to come up with heuristics for lawsuits involving patent infringement like: Companies can only sue for a percentage of the revenue they themselves generated from sale of the product related to the patent. There is no great way to do it. It infringes on an inventors rights to sell their creation which i beleive deeply. However, these fucking patent trolls need to be stopped.

The worst part is it somehow started out as a patent PROTECTION organization and then somehow morphed into a patent troll. Absolutely ridiculous.

I think it was challenged in this case. Page 6 of the verdict form asks if the '142 patent claims are valid, so presumably the defendant put on an invalidity case. (And it would be rare not to.) The prior art would have to pre-date 1997 and practice each element of the asserted claims, which recite some detail in addition to using "business rules" to distribute email. (Usually, it is this detail that makes the difference.) If anyone is curious, it would be instructive to pull briefing from Pacer, and look for any motions for summary judgement of invalidity for a (relatively) concise summary of that part of the case.

I don't see any PTAB decisions on the record and the case was filed before modern IPR review of bad patents was instituted in 2010.

It's all nonsensical, so try not to stress yourself too hard trying to make sense of it.

This is much like prosecutors filing 68 charges against someone that committed a single crime. They pick the number from the most absurd form of math, which sets the bar high. If they had asked for $15m, the might have gotten only 6% of that, so they start as high as they can, assuming a reduced valuation, because they know the patent is flimsy at best.

The problem is that they got anything at all, which lends validity to absurdly obvious patents with decades of prior art.

This kind of mathematics is always pie-in-the-sky, but it's generally based on some function of the sales of the infringing product. So a patent may cover a single narrow feature worth only a fraction of a single sale, but if there were a billion copies sold, those fractions add up. How you derive these numbers belongs to the lofty realm of experts charging thousands of dollars by the hour.

You are giving the american public too much credit...