REVEALED: How Giant Patent Troll Intellectual Ventures Does Business
Nathan Myhrvold |
Founded by former Microsoft chief technology officer Nathan Myhrvold about a decade ago, the company’s main business is getting patents, then using them to extract licensing fees or legal settlements from other companies.
- Intellectual Ventures has between 30,000 and 60,000 patents. That’s a rough estimate. But even the low number makes Intellectual Ventures (IV) the 5th largest patent portfolio of any U.S. company, and 15th in the world. Nearly all of those patents originated elsewhere. IV does very little inventing of its own.
- It uses more than 1,200 shell companies. IV’s patent holdings and legal actions are hard to track because it often assigns patents to shell companies. The researchers say they discovered at least 1,276 of these, and they “have little doubt that other shell companies have been formed.”
- About half its patents originated outside the U.S. A lot of patents are not valued as highly overseas as they are in the U.S. “This suggests that Intellectual Ventures may be acting as an arbitrageur to exploit the disparities in intellectual property valuation between the United States and the rest of the world,” write the researchers.
- Big companies invest, then use its patents for defense. For instance, Verizon paid $350 million for patent licenses an equity stake in one of IV’s funds in 2008. When TiVo sued Verizon for patent infringement, Verizon “purchased a patent from one of Intellectual Ventures’ shell companies, which was then put to work as a counterclaim in the TiVo suit,” say the researchers.
- How it gets patents from smaller companies. According to the researchers, IV has a “turnkey” method for getting patents from smaller companies. IV pays the company a one-time fee and a percentage of any profits it makes from the patents. IV then “assumes the costs of maintaining the portfolio, and gains the right to go after other companies.” In the case of a company called Digimarc, IV agreed to pay $36 million over three years, plus 20% of the profits from all successful licensing and litigation.
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