

World's leading patent troll sues Motorola over Android phones - bryanlarsen
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/10/worlds-leading-patent-troll-sues-motorola.ars

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ChuckMcM
Patent-a-geddon continues apace. That Intellectual Ventures (IV) is revealed
to be a patent litigation engine is not surprising to folks who have followed
the careers of folks like Nathan Mhyrvold. Back in 1998 the company I was with
turned down money they offered because, regardless of their pitch, too much
rested on their staying benign vs this. It didn't help that I had come off a
really sour experience at Sun where I had tried to negotiate a right to
implement the RSA patent in Java and at the last second RSADSI pulled a fast
one and rewrote key parts of the contract which changed it into a license for
their software (of no value to the Java effort).

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.

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nextparadigms
Could it be just a coincidence that IV is run by a former Microsoft executive?
I'm thinking it isn't. This way Microsoft stays "clean", and Google/Motorola
can't sue IV back or threaten them with their patents since it's not even a
real company.

~~~
coderdude
Probably not some kind of corporate conspiracy. It's sad that so many people
seem to agree with you. It shows a lack of critical thinking. I'm sure we'd
all like to believe in these underground corporate black-ops schemes but
they're just fun to imagine, they're not reality.

~~~
nitrogen
The Halloween Documents of yore would suggest otherwise
(<http://www.catb.org/~esr/halloween/>). There were also many telling e-mails
revealed in the Comes v. Iowa legislation
([http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=2007021720...](http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=2007021720190018)),
particularly the ones regarding evangelism.

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.

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andrewpi
Since Google has a license to the IV portfolio, would Motorola be covered by
that license if the sale to Google goes through?

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singh
Don't want to sidetrack from the main conversation, but Nathan Myhrvold seems
to have a very impressive past [1]. He studied QFT under Stephen Hawking at
Cambridge.

[1] : <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Myhrvold>

~~~
raganwald
Indeed! He does have an impressive and admirable _past_.

~~~
bryanlarsen
Parts of his present are still impressive, perhaps even admirable:
[http://www.amazon.com/Modernist-Cuisine-Art-Science-
Cooking/...](http://www.amazon.com/Modernist-Cuisine-Art-Science-
Cooking/dp/0982761007)

Now if he'd just dissolve IV and concentrate on the cooking...

~~~
calloc
I am torn. I would love to purchase the books, yet at the same time I don't
want to give any money to someone that could potentially sue me and my company
for everything it is worth...

~~~
SkyMarshal
Ahem...

[http://duckduckgo.com/?q=modernist+cuisine+art+science+cooki...](http://duckduckgo.com/?q=modernist+cuisine+art+science+cooking+torrent)

~~~
lachyg
Only book four is on the internet as a torrent, and as an owner of the actual
books, it doesn't even slightly come closer to comparing. The real books are
stunning, and full of fantastic knowledge. They're works of art, and an
encyclopaedia of cooking, food, hygiene and nutrition knowledge.

~~~
SkyMarshal
I'm sure they are, also judging from the pics on Amazon. Like the TAOCP of
cooking. My response was more about the karma Myrvold has engendered for
himself.

------
feb
Google is not the first one who funded IV and gets sued. Xilinx had the same
experience. [http://gametimeip.com/2011/09/07/xilinx-lawsuit-reveals-
more...](http://gametimeip.com/2011/09/07/xilinx-lawsuit-reveals-more-of-
intellectual-ventures-strategy/)

------
serge2k
Why are you even allowed to sell patents?

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?

~~~
kenjackson
You have to write some relatively complex law to prohibit it.

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...

