Nathan Myhrvold, erstwhile Microsoft CTO and now patent powerbroker extraordinare, has hit the news this weekend, but it’s not for his latest licensing deal with a mobile phone maker, or for a lawsuit against a tech company (or three) that refuses to pay up for patents that his company, Intellectual Ventures, owns — but for a different kettle of fish altogether.
Myhrvold has won the James Beard Foundation book award for cookbook of the year — the top prize in one of the industry’s most prestigious accolades — for a book that deep-dives, appropriately enough, into the science and technology of cooking.
His book, the self-published Modernist Cuisine, is a six-volume, 2,438-page effort that he co-wrote with Chris Young and Maxime Bilet (and a 20-person team of cooks), which is selling for $625 (or $455.11 on Amazon). → Read More
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. → Read More
Watch me ruin your Sunday afternoon with one word. Ready? Here we go.
Patents.
This week on NBC’s Press:Here we talked about this topic most of our readers equate with a long, slow, painful root canal. Or worse. Laura Sydell of NPR was also on the show, and if you haven’t listened to her episode on This American Life called “When Patents Attack,” go do it now. We’ll wait.
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Back in early April, Kent Walker, Google’s Senior Vice President & General Counsel, wrote a post on the Google blog titled “Patents and innovation“. The reason behind the post was clear: Google was feeling the pressure in the patent space after multiple attacks against them and their partners. And now they were going to do something about it.
In his post, Walker noted that Google had laid down the initial “stalking-horse” bid for over 6,000 patents that were up for sale due to the Nortel bankruptcy. “If successful, we hope this portfolio will not only create a disincentive for others to sue Google, but also help us, our partners and the open source community—which is integrally involved in projects like Android and Chrome—continue to innovate,” Walker wrote.
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Intellectual Ventures is (again) suing a host of companies, including HP, Dell, Acer, Logitech, Kingston Technology, Best Buy and Walmart, over patent infringement.
The firm, which has amassed a huge trove of technology patents since it was founded back in 2000, sued nine other tech companies, including Check Point Software, McAfee, Symantec, and Trend Micro in December last year. → Read More
You can always count on Hunch founder Chris Dixon for interesting Tweets. He just sent out this one:
turns out patent trolling might not pay. Intellectual Ventures has negative 78% return.http://bit.ly/bSfamC
The link is a PDf download of a document from the University of Texas Management Company listing all of its private investments in venture funds and private equity funds, along with their internal rates of return (IRR). One of the worst performers is Intellectual Ventures, the patent portfolio fund started by Nathan Myrhvold that has a reputation for patent extortion. One of its funds, the Invention Development Fund I, has a negative 73 percent IRR (Dixon mistakenly thought it was negative 78 percent, but close enough). Another fund, the Invention Investment Fund II, has a negative 10 percent return. The two funds combined are delivering a negative 36.66 percent IRR for the University of Texas. → Read More
Patent litigation is getting so bad that a new startup, RPX Corp. (aka, Rational Patent) is gearing up to help companies defend themselves specifically against patent trolls (organizations that buy up patent portfolios with the express intention of forcing other companies to license those patents or face a lawsuit). RPX markets itself as a “defensive patent aggregator.” It buys up its own patents, or strikes licensing deals on behalf of its members, and charges companies $35,000 to $4.9 million a year for perpetual licenses to those patents.
In other words, pay up now and any patents in RPX’s portfolio can’t be used in litigation against your company. RPX is clearly not as bad as some of the more egregious patent trolls out there, or even patent funds like Nathan Myrhvold’s Intellectual Ventures. In fact, it promises never to use its patents in litigation against companies, and there is obviously a demand for its services. (Cisco and IBM have already signed up). Ultimately, its business still boils down to a protection racket. An enlightened one, perhaps, but still a protection racket. → Read More
Don’t blame Nathan Myhrvold for taking advantage of the culture of rampant patent litigation in this country. He is only doing what large companies with vast patent portfolios such as IBM and Microsoft do on a daily basis: use the threat of patent infringement litigation to strike lucrative patent licensing deals. Except Myhrvold, who used to be Bill Gates’ right-hand man at Microsoft during the 1990s, does it through his patent-gobbling fund, Intellectual Ventures. The fund has collected more than 20,000 patents on the cheap from universities, inventors, and bankrupt companies, which it then uses to extract hefty licensing fees from some of the biggest companies in the world.
Since he started Intellectual Ventures eight years ago, he has returned $1 billion in licensing fees to investors, he tells the WSJ. Those investors include some of the same companies who are licensing his patents: Sony, Nokia, Microsoft, Intel, Google, eBay, SAP, and Nvidia. A story in today’s WSJ (behind the pay wall, unfortunately), details how companies like Cisco and Verizon are ponying up hundreds of millions of dollars each to stay (and how others, like Comcast, refuse to pay). Excerpt:
In recent months Mr. Myhrvold’s firm, Intellectual Ventures, has secured payments in the range of $200 million to $400 million from companies including telecom giant Verizon Communications Inc. and networking-gear maker Cisco Systems Inc., according to people familiar with the situation. Verizon, for instance, disclosed in a July filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that it plans to pay as much as $350 million for patent licenses and an equity stake in a patent-holding investment fund. The company operating that investment fund is Intellectual Ventures, according to a person familiar with the terms of the deal.
San Francisco, CA
