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.
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.
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.
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.
So, Microsoft's thoroughly confirmed connection to Baystar who invested in SCO group while they were embroiled in an IP lawsuit against IBM about Linux technology is "not reality" either?
How can you say that in general? Dirty tricks do happen. It is naive to assume everything is squeaky clean. I also think it is disingenuous to use the word conspiracy here, as if he made some tinfoil hat statement.
"Intellectual Ventures was founded in 2000 by Nathan Myhrvold and Edward Jung of Microsoft as a private partnership. It lists Peter Detkin of Intel, and Gregory Gorder of Perkins Coie, a Seattle-based law firm as co-founders. They reportedly have raised over $5 billion from many large companies including Microsoft, Intel, Sony, Nokia, Apple, Google, SAP, Nvidia and eBay, plus investment firms such as Charles River Ventures. Reported statistics indicate over 30,000 purchased patents and applications[3] and over 2000 internally-developed inventions. Licenses to patents are obtained through investment and royalties.[4]"
You're as sound in your logic as saying that because IV was founded by the author of Modernist Cuisine, it's obvious that the molecular gastronomy movement is responsible for Google's patent troubles.
Microsoft may well be completely uninvolved, but while the molecular gastronomy movement lacks any motive for involvement, the same cannot be said for Microsoft.
among other things, Intellectual Ventures filed an amici curiae brief in Microsoft v. I4I, another piece of patent litigation. on behalf of the respondents.
Intellectual Ventures has no loyalty to anything but its own inventions.
edit: incidentally, the outcome of Microsoft v. i4i (and the parent lawsuit, i4i v. Microsoft) was an out-of-court settlement where Microsoft paid i4i $300 million, at the hazard of an injunction against selling Office in the United States: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I4i
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.
By all accounts he's remarkably accomplished and intelligent. To make everything worse, he's already impossibly rich. It's as if he's decided to just make the world a worse place because he can.
I do not know the man well enough to pass any judgement on him. But, your statement [1] raised a question in my mind: On the wiki page, there is an outline of his plan to eliminate global warming through geoengineering. I assume this will cost a lot of money. What if he is trying to build up his wealth so that one day he can fund a massive geoengineering project to help the earth's climate? He has demonstrated the desire at least.
[1] " It's as if he's decided to just make the world a worse place because he can."
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...
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.
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.
Charlie Rose interviewed Myrvold in 1996: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7896274730082503348 [lots of internet predictions/discussion]. It's truly fascinating how much the world has changed and how much things are the same... (half-way through, but hoping to catch him contradict himself on patents.)
P.S. Here are some other interviews he has done with Rose over the years:
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?
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...
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.