Background on patent trolls

Courtesy The Browser, a link to a good piece by Planet Money's Alex Blumberg and NPR's Laura Sydell about software patents. The piece pays special attention to the role (some would call it the outsized role) that former Microsoft chief technology officer Nathan Myhrvold's company Intellectual Ventures plays in current software patent disputes. After you've read this article, or listened to the This American Life radio piece on which it is based, you might have a better idea of why Myhrvold's name is mud throughout Silicon Valley, even though no one will admit to that sentiment on the record.

I've written a couple of pieces on the woes being caused by patent troll Lodsys, the second of which, "Lodsys sues developers", is representative of my feelings about entities like Lodsys that exist solely to profit off of intellectual property they did not originate (and which, if we had a functioning patent system, would likely never have been granted patent status). Blumberg's and Sydell's work gives a broader look at how patent trolls undermine the business of innovating.

One of the many illuminating bits of information that Blumberg and Sydell dug up is just how Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures is tied into some of these patent trolls. Intellectual Ventures turns out to have a "financial interest" in a patent troll profiled in the article, Oasis Research. So even though IV ostensibly sold some of its patents to Oasis, IV stands to take a cut of whatever profits Oasis makes off of coercing payments for those patents.

Oasis Research has exactly the same address, right down to the suite number, as Lodsys. Does anybody think IV doesn't have a silent interest in Lodsys, and won't take a cut of that company's profits as well? Only time and court documents will tell.

The article gives Myhrvold a chance to defend Intellectual Ventures; he does so by spouting empty clichés about helping patentholders get the money they deserve for their ideas. Myhrvold comes out so badly in this piece, in fact, that I'd score it low on the fairness meter were it not that Lodsys' defense in its own blog is just as unconvincing as Myhrvold's arguments. Moreover, even when given the chance to tell the world how much good Intellectual Ventures had done for the patentholders it claims to be helping, IV's cofounder could only name two deals it had brought about. That's two deals for a portfolio containing tens of thousands of patents. Not a tremendous batting average.

Whatever good Myhrvold thinks he's doing is, on the evidence, far outweighed by the evil he is wreaking on thousands of individual software developers and small companies. And I'm convinced that a man as smart as Myhrvold knows exactly how rapacious he's being and how little good he's doing. But then, Myhrvold is rich enough to have spent time researching and writing a 6-volume cookbook that you and I will never be able to afford, so he clearly doesn't have to give a shit what I or anyone else thinks.