Never troll a troll, say men and women much wiser than moi.
To them, I say no, in this case it’s perfectly fine to troll the troll.
From the funny dude who brought you the Mark by Mark Zuckerberg collection, now comes a website where you can, basically, send him $9 via PayPal.
But in return, the funny dude will package and send an actual troll doll to Intellectual Ventures, the patent-holding firm that manages to claim that it’s in the business of creating “a more efficient and dynamic invention economy” without breaking out in loud, slightly evil-sounding laughter.
Here’s how the funny dude explains it, albeit more eloquently than I ever could:
how it works: you donate $9. we package and ship a troll doll to intellectual ventures. intellectual ventures frowns. we smile.
why trolls, why intellectual ventures: IV is like the 6th grade bully thieving lunch money. but worse. because this lunch money would otherwise go to building the next paypal/farmville mashup.
TechCrunch would be in dire straits without the possibility for a next generation of such mashups to blossom, so please donate. Or not, which is cool too.
Intellectual Ventures is a private company founded in 2000 to invest in “pure invention.” Its goal is to develop a large patent portfolio rather than to actually develop new systems. Its employees are predominantly patent attorneys, physicists, engineers and biotechnologists. They also have hired prominent scientists to perform invention including Robert Langer of MIT, Leroy Hood of the Institute for Systems Biology, Ed Harlow of Harvard Medical School, Danny Hillis of Applied Minds, and Sir John Pendry of Imperial...
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