Intellectual Ventures cuts 140 employees from its patent-buying workforce
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Re: Intellectual Ventures cuts 140 employees from its patent-buying workforce
#2Alice effect?
Re: Intellectual Ventures cuts 140 employees from its patent-buying workforce
#3> The main issue debated is whether or not companies like IV hurt or help innovation with its business practices.
This is an interesting point. Has anyone (without a direct financial interest to do so) made a credible argument that IV is anything other than harmful to innovation?
Re: Intellectual Ventures cuts 140 employees from its patent-buying workforce
#4This is that patent troll organization right?
"the company has fallen on hard times as some of its bigger investors become less interested in buying into its funds."
Good.
Re: Intellectual Ventures cuts 140 employees from its patent-buying workforce
#5> The main issue debated is whether or not companies like IV hurt or help innovation with its business practices. This is an interesting point. Has anyone (without a direct financial interest to do so) made a credible argument that IV is anything other than harmful to innovation?
There's this one article, it might not meet all your criteria though. [1]
[1] http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2013/12/10/the-other-side-of-the-d...
Re: Intellectual Ventures cuts 140 employees from its patent-buying workforce
#6> The main issue debated is whether or not companies like IV hurt or help innovation with its business practices. This is an interesting point. Has anyone (without a direct financial interest to do so) made a credible argument that IV is anything other than harmful to innovation?
Devil's advocate: A secondary market for patents incentivizes investors to fund innovation, in the hopes of re-selling when/if the IP becomes valuable.
That's the story, anyway. In the real world, I think patents are vastly net-negative towards genuine innovation, and in most cases, morally repugnant besides.
Re: Intellectual Ventures cuts 140 employees from its patent-buying workforce
#7This is that patent troll organization right? "the company has fallen on hard times as some of its bigger investors become less interested in buying into its funds." Good.
I imagine giving patents from your portfolio to patent trolling companies (Lodsys), who then sue your client's (Apple) partners, doesn't help.
Re: Intellectual Ventures cuts 140 employees from its patent-buying workforce
#8> The main issue debated is whether or not companies like IV hurt or help innovation with its business practices. This is an interesting point. Has anyone (without a direct financial interest to do so) made a credible argument that IV is anything other than harmful to innovation?
Good question, unclear answer.
IV is not a typical patent troll, so the standard patent troll argument is hard to apply. They do not file large numbers of small lawsuits, but rather a small number of very large lawsuits (e.g. against the Intel/Ford/AIG types). They generally do loser pays, and a few other things that make them hard to bucket as a normal patent troll.
IV spends a large amount of money (billions [1]) on purchasing patents. One might reasonably expect that to encourage innovation. As I understand it, most of those patents are not software patents, though (again I am not 100% sure) a large fraction of their lawsuits are based on software patents [citation needed]. One might reasonable expect that to discourage innovation.
An interesting anecdote: Nest bought IV licenses to defend itself from Honeywell [2]. I would argue that Nest is a relatively decent innovation, so in this (very specific) case, one could argue that IV encouraged innovation.
As I said, hard to balance.
[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/04/11/us-microsoft-apple... [2] http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/11/nest-buys-protection-licens...
Re: Intellectual Ventures cuts 140 employees from its patent-buying workforce
#9I hope this whole racketeering workshop will be cut for good sooner than later.
Re: Intellectual Ventures cuts 140 employees from its patent-buying workforce
#10"Bloomberg BusinessWeek reports that IV kept asking the same companies to reinvest, and if they didn’t, the threat was that the company could always find something to sue one of the entities over."
Say, nice corporation you got there. Shame if anything were to happen to it.