
PlainSite Exposes 2,000 Intellectual Ventures Shell Companies - thinkcomp
http://www.plainsite.org/articles/article.html?id=2
======
javajosh
You know what's worse than patent trolls gaming the system? It's all of those
people in the world who say, "Yeah, IV is smart. They've found a loophole and
are exploiting it. Nothing to be done."

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.

~~~
law
> Organizations that follow the letter of the law but ignore the principles
> behind them should inspire our strongest contempt.

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.

~~~
morsch
He's not saying they _must_ conform with these ambiguous rules. But if they
don't, it's fair to be contemptuous of them. There is nothing at all unusual
about this, there are lots of actions that won't get you in jail but will get
you punished in various social manners.

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.

~~~
law
> He's not saying they must conform with these ambiguous rules. But if they
> don't, it's fair to be contemptuous of them. There is nothing at all unusual
> about this, there are lots of actions that won't get you in jail but will
> get you punished in various social manners.

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.

~~~
shpiel
Both. If hacker who discovered bug in a system should have reported it,
instead of exploiting it.

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.

~~~
law
Except patent trolls are not even close to the first groups of people to
notice this "bug." Many "white hat hackers" came first; there are many law
review articles published concerning the flaws in the patent system. It's not
like Congress didn't know about it. They, like always, decided to punt. This
is their wake-up call.

------
Elepsis
At first glance, this list is a bit of a joke. Just on the first page you see
Acco Brands (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACCO_Brands>) and Agere Systems
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agere_Systems>), which shows that not even the
most rudimentary fact checking went into this effort.

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.

~~~
mherdeg
Tom Ewing's paper ( <http://stlr.stanford.edu/pdf/feldman-giants-among-us.pdf>
, datestamped Jan. 2012) says they've identified 1,276 shell companies, which
is quite a bit lower than the 2,201 items listed by PlainSite.

(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...](http://www.thisamericanlife.org/sites/default/files/TAL441_transcript.pdf)
, so I guess he's been working on this for a while.)

------
paulsutter
I'm fascinated by the vexatious litigant point. Would a lawyer here care to
comment on that?

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...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vexatious_litigation#United_States)

~~~
001sky
A litigant though is a 'legal person'. if you have 2000 legal entities (ie,
legally== persons), it seems to help you on the math. But your question still
stands and is a good one. Its not clear what role a common "controling entity"
would have, for example, on the ability of affiliates, spv's and
relatives/children to file or be found 'vexatious' etc.[1]

________

[1] INAL, but I think this question should be answerable.

~~~
rdl
While I'm generally against RICO as law, this seems like one case where it
would be reasonable to apply.

------
manhonest
I don't care what anyone says, Aaron Greenspan you have once again impressed
me... can't say the same for Zuckerberg. Well done.

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. ;)

~~~
praptak
> Take, for example, Aht Chu LLC.

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."_

------
sytelus
There is a strangely titled book written by one of the early Microsoft
employee called "Barbarians Led by Bill Gates" which describes authors
interactions with Myrvold. It's a very enlightening and entertaining book to
learn more about how Myrvold works.

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.

------
damian2000
He seems like a smart guy <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Myhrvold> ...
wonder what made him turn his hand to patent litigation?

~~~
javajosh
I've heard him interviewed about his interest in cooking. He sounded like one
of those fastidious geniuses who look at you like you're an insect - totally
calculating, without a single molecule of empathy (you didn't know empathy had
a molecule? well, it does).

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.

~~~
001sky
His book on cooking is called Modernist Cuisine, and is turning into something
of a Landmark publishing/reference work. Its ~5 volumes and retails for ~$500
dollars.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernist_Cuisine>

Just begs the question, though. Doesn't this guy have something better to do?
Dunno.

~~~
damian2000
So this is where the profits from the patent litigation goes:

 _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._

~~~
krichman
He's ruining small companies using a tactic that is objectively unfair, and
then using his ill-gotten gains to sate his own gluttony.

He'd need to have a long handlebar moustache and tie heroines to railroad
tracks to be more of a cartoon villain stereotype.

------
rdl
This is the kind of stuff I wish WikiLeaks did.

~~~
001sky
Wanted: Wikileaks need a "growth hacker"

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.

------
001sky
I'd like to see the NY Times do investigative reporting like this.

~~~
NatW
Agreed. NPR / This American Life did a great piece on Patent Trolls "When
Patents Attack" (in case you missed it):
[http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-
archives/episode/441/w...](http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-
archives/episode/441/when-patents-attack)

~~~
001sky
I'm thinking more of the data analytics-heavy reporting, reviewing public
records and making them more accessible, etc. Almost a new breed of thinking
and approach to the subject matter.

------
larrys
Actually I'm not sure what value you can get from this list at all.

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).

~~~
jp--1
I would suggest the methodology make use of not only the assignments data from
the patent offices but also the data from as many state company registries as
possible. It's not easy because there is no harmonization of this type of data
among all US states and some (Delaware, Nevada, etc.) deliberately make it
easy for companies to hide information about who owns them.

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.

------
namank
Company list:

<http://www.plainsite.org/tags/index.html?id=640>

~~~
anigbrowl
It's not possible to look at any page but the first one. Entering another
number takes you to page with links to 24 hour Fitness and 3M Corporation.
Also, clicking on the individual entries doesn't provide you with any evidence
or a link to the USPTO record, just the company's mailing address.

Sounded interesting, but all we've got here is the badly-presented output of a
web scraping session.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Hmm maybe we're not seeing the same thing this URI:

    
    
       //www.plainsite.org/tags/index.html?table=entitiestags&page=3&id=640
    

You can change the _page=3_ to any number between 1 and 44 to get more company
names.

~~~
anigbrowl
Apparently it's been fixed so it works in the page now, but why on earth would
I want to edit the URL as a navigation method?

------
manhonest
Other attempts at this task:

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.

~~~
MaysonL
<http://stlr.stanford.edu/pdf/feldman-giants-among-us.pdf>

------
sidcool
Can someone pls explain me what happened here?

~~~
namank
instead of using patents to invent new things, they use patents to sue people
and make money.

~~~
ahi
Which would only be sort of bad if the patents weren't shit.

------
stelliosk
Keyser Soze was either German or Turkish in the movie, the Hungarian mob were
going to buy the only guy who could identify Keyser Soze from a group of
Argentinians!

------
scanr
I just had a thought. What if Myhrvold has realised that the only way that the
patent system can be changed is if he brings innovation to a halt completely
using Intellectual Ventures. Only he can't tell anyone because he believes
that if he does, it will undermine his efforts.

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.

~~~
DannyBee
1\. If Nathan believes that, he's been lying/hiding it from every person in
the world, repeatedly

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.

------
batgaijin
Now do bg3.

