The Microsoft- and Gates Foundation-backed patent troll known as Intellectual Ventures just keeps growing and growing. It devours a lot of the industry using patent tax which accompanies extortion and lobbying. This should be criminal and those behind it would be better off in some padded cell. They are dangerous sociopaths with friends in high places.
“Remember a few months ago, when Intellectual Ventures said that there was nothing at all nefarious about their 2,000 or so shell companies?”
--Mike MasnickOne key person in this extortion racket is Peter Detkin, whom we wrote about before. Companies like CBS help whitewash him and others, impeding federal action that should shut it all down in the name of RICO Act. One longtime critic of this extortion racket writes about new facts, starting with some background: "Nearly two years ago, This American Life did an incredible episode about patents and patent trolling, which really got the issue of patent trolling into the mainstream. At the center of that episode was an exploration into Intellectual Ventures, the world's largest, most obnoxious patent troll. The story revolved around one single patent (5,771,354), which Intellectual Ventures itself had held up as an example of how they were really just helping the poor, brilliant, lone inventor who was being ripped off. In that story, This American Life reporter/producer Alex Blumberg and NPR New reporter Laura Sydell tried to follow the story of that patent to exonerate Intellectual Ventures and show that, indeed, it was helping small inventors get their due. But the story turned out to not stand up to even the slightest amount of scrutiny. Because when they went in search of the inventor, Chris Crawford, he refused to respond to them, and then IV itself noted that it had "sold off" the patent and it was currently engaged in litigation. The entity doing the litigation was a company called Oasis Research, which had an empty office in Marshall, Texas with no employees, but had sued over a dozen internet companies for broadly doing online backup.
"In a hilarious exchange with IV's Peter Detkin, the guy who coined the phrase patent troll but now likes to delude himself that he's not an executive at the world's largest troll, pretended that it was some sort of "ambush" when Blumberg simply asked him to explain when IV bought the patent from Crawford and then when and to whom they sold it, based on the data on the US Patent Office's own website. Hilariously, Detkin insisted that he hadn't looked at the USPTO website, so he didn't know what was going on."
According to the following paragraph, there are now over or around 2,000 proxies, not about 1,100 as reported a few years ago. This is a pyramid schemes and there are laws against such schemes. Masnick writes: "Remember a few months ago, when Intellectual Ventures said that there was nothing at all nefarious about their 2,000 or so shell companies? Perhaps they knew what was coming... which was a pretty clear expose of how Intellectual Ventures is very much the same sort of entity that Peter Detkin once claimed were hellbent on holding up innovation. Except, now he's profiting from it. Massively. While pretending not to."
"There is a law against this. There may even be several laws against this."Here is another interesting new bit about this pyramid scheme: "Well-known non-practicing entity Intellectual Ventures has been fairly quiet on the litigation front, particularly as compared to other high-profile NPEs. And when IV has filed suits, it has generally targeted technology companies, such as semiconductor manufacturers, handset makers, or telecom service providers. But earlier this week, IV branched out into new territory, suing the First National Bank of Omaha in Nebraska district court and accusing the bank of infringing several patents (including some potentially standard-essential patents)."
There is a law against this. There may even be several laws against this. The proxies act as a shield (obfuscation) against enforcement of the law, or even an investigation.
This is only starting to show the scope of this racketeering operation, which was more recently whitewashed by CBS (aided perpetually by the corporate media that won't do journalism which can result in arrests for racketeering and pyramid schemes).
Intellectual Ventures is neither a company nor a firm. It is a criminal operation, operating with impunity. ⬆