Even Nathan Myhrvold Needs To Realize A Return

[bananas]

Source: Forbes

Nathan Myhrvold’s Intellectual Ventures, the $5 billion investment firm that has spent years purchasing patents, confirmed Wednesday what most of the tech world had long suspected: It’s nothing but a glorified patent troll.

The Bellevue, Wash, company announced Wednesday that it filed patent infringement complaints against companies like McAfee, Symantec Corp., Check Point Software Technologies, Hynix Semiconductor and Altera Corp. Myhrvold, who used to be the chief technology officer at Microsoft, co-founded Intellectual Ventures in 2000.

For years he raised money from technology companies like Microsoft, Google and Sony, and financial investors, then purchased thousands of patents often through secretive shell companies. He tried to make a go of it by extracting fat patent licensing fees from technology companies, some of which paid up, but it seems licensing was not a sufficient strategy for Intellectual Ventures. In order for it to compel companies to take a license, to prove its offensive capabilities were robust and not just a bluff, Myhrvold actually had to sue.

Even Myhrvold needs to realize actual returns and in the end Myhrvold has proven that the only way to monetize billions of dollars of patent investments is to go to the courthouse and file a lawsuit. This was an outcome predicted by Tomas Kellner, who wrote the first serious investigative article on Intellectual Ventures in Forbes Magazine in 2005, but resisted by Myhrvold for years. It’s not cool to be a patent troll, a much-vilified practice in which contingency lawyers or small companies with no operations sue businesses to extort money.

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Read more: http://blogs.forbes.com/nathanvardi/2010/12/08/even-nathan-myhrvold-needs-to-realize-a-return/?boxes=businesschannelsections

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Joe Romm righteously dissed Myhrvold about clean tech a while back: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aclimateprogress.org+Myhrvold

[notesdev]

1. He's just doing

what made Microsoft a success... snow people under with legal costs.