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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
#2220% for 140 people. That's 700 people. Do they really need that many people to buy patents?
Re: Intellectual Ventures cuts 140 employees from its patent-buying workforce
#23IV is a garbage company trying to portray itself as a bastion of innovation. There are certain severe "bugs" in the way our intellectual property laws work in the US. IV exploits these bugs to make Billions of dollars. IV is not concerned with whether something is good or not. They exist to make hay while the intellectual property laws remain broken. I had no idea they had 500 people working for them. That means that…
Do you find judgement and shame to be constructive communication tools for positive change?
They appear to be widely and successfully used tools, but I don't like them.
Re: Intellectual Ventures cuts 140 employees from its patent-buying workforce
#24IV is a garbage company trying to portray itself as a bastion of innovation. There are certain severe "bugs" in the way our intellectual property laws work in the US. IV exploits these bugs to make Billions of dollars. IV is not concerned with whether something is good or not. They exist to make hay while the intellectual property laws remain broken. I had no idea they had 500 people working for them. That means that…
Do you find judgement and shame to be constructive communication tools for positive change?
Well, if we look to religious texts, they have been the cornerstone of social control for millennia. There may be better tools, but judgement and shame have been undeniably effective.
Re: Intellectual Ventures cuts 140 employees from its patent-buying workforce
#25Intellectual Vultures would be a more apt name.
Re: Intellectual Ventures cuts 140 employees from its patent-buying workforce
#26IV is a garbage company trying to portray itself as a bastion of innovation. There are certain severe "bugs" in the way our intellectual property laws work in the US. IV exploits these bugs to make Billions of dollars. IV is not concerned with whether something is good or not. They exist to make hay while the intellectual property laws remain broken. I had no idea they had 500 people working for them. That means that…
Do you find judgement and shame to be constructive communication tools for positive change?
If it shames people from joining them and filing garbage software patents, then yes.
You aren't going to convince someone that works at IV one way or another. Its not like they haven't heard the arguments before. Its just that they don't care.
Re: Intellectual Ventures cuts 140 employees from its patent-buying workforce
#27I was part of a "partnership" with IV and MagicJack.
http://www.intellectualventures.com/news/press-releases/magi...
Even though the PR seems to say that MJ is joining the force - you can clearly see that none of the original Vocaltec/Magicjack VoIP patents have been asserted against anyone else/used as defense in any patent lawsuit. By playing ball, we were able to use their patent portfolio to defend against the MANY patent lawsuits brought against MJ. It did help in a few cases when we were sued over a number of different VoIP and USB-related patents. From what I remember, though, it was expensive to be in their alliance and you had to contribute your own patents as well. The idea itself is interesting. I think a non-profit could better fill the need for everyone sharing a big patent blanket.
Re: Intellectual Ventures cuts 140 employees from its patent-buying workforce
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
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]) o…
> IV spends a large amount of money (billions [1]) on purchasing patents. One might reasonably expect that to encourage innovation. I don't see how purchasing any kind of patents can encourage innovation. Innovation is encouraged by returns from the innovation, not by returns from sold patents. Recycling patents for profit is a completely parasitic business which has nothing to do with innovation.
You found an R&D company, the research goes slower than expected, and after five years you run out of funding. Result of that is: 1) you can sell the partial progress and recoup at least a little cash; versus 2) all your work is worth absolutely zip. If (1) is true rather than (2), you'll be more likely to engage in a risky R&D business in the first place. If (2) is true, you'll focus on something that will yield a sellable product quickly.
This sort of trajectory is not uncommon in industries that have a steep R&D curve. When I worked at an wireless R&D company, we had individual pieces of lab equipment the cost of which would fund a non-trivial web startup to an MVP stage. There are biotech startups that burn through hundreds of millions of dollars without getting to the MVP stage. What the company is left with if it can't build a sellable product before running out of funding is a major concern for these sorts of businesses.
Re: Intellectual Ventures cuts 140 employees from its patent-buying workforce
#29Here's a list of their shell companies:
http://www.plainsite.org/tags/intellectual-ventures-shell-co...
Re: Intellectual Ventures cuts 140 employees from its patent-buying workforce
#30I'd be curious to know what returns have IV realized for it's investors to date?
Also, "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."? Sounds like an extortion racket.