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… → 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. → Read More
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… → Read More
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… → 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… → 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… → Read More
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
San Francisco
San Francisco, CA
Berlin, Germany
