Summary: The extortion operation and pyramid scheme known as "Intellectual Ventures" (originally formed by Bill Gates and his close friend) is rapidly growing and the FTC grows increasingly concerned

Bill Gates' pet extortion operation (Intellectual Ventures) -- the entity which likes to shake down Microsoft rivals while pretending to save the world -- is looking for more money to buy more patents. A patent trolls expert writes:

IV touts good returns, but one public source reports returns as poor as -70 percent.

That's not the point though. Intellectual Ventures is a competition-manipulating entity. Even if it makes no direct income (or let elone profit) from patents, it sure helps its financiers, including Bill Gates for example, to make billions of dollars at the expense of competition crushed by patent litigation (filed through proxies). Andy Updegrove says that the FTC is trying to improve its comprehension of patent trolls' business models, but will it investigate Intellectual Ventures? A lot of lobbying from Bill Gates and Intellectual Ventures (for years now) has been used to keep regulators away and there are reports which suggest Intellectual Ventures will keep hiding behind its proxies, publicly pretending not to be a patent troll. It's a massive PR campaign. Anyway, as Updegrove put it:

It’s hardly news that the Obama Administration is no friend of so-called “Patent Assertion Entities,” or PAEs. Not only members of the administration, but the big man himself have spoken publicly against those companies that make a business model out of buying and asserting patents, as compared to those that actually develop new technology, such as universities, which then then seek to license (sometimes referred to as “Non-Practicing Entities,” or NPEs).

Most of what little we know about the business strategies, licensing practices and economics of PAEs has been gleaned from disclosures made in the course of litigation. Now the Federal Trade Commission has decided to gather some first-hand information on exactly how PAEs operate. And, because it is a regulatory agency, it can do so by asking the PAEs themselves to respond, and under oath, to boot.

Trolls are a very major problem, but some are summoned by entities like Intellectual Ventures. This one is said to have literally thousands of proxies. Those proxies are destroying everything that the "mother ship" (Intellectual Ventures, i.e. Bill Gates et al.) wish to destroy, including the Web, which is now transforming into another vehicle of the copyright cartel. The W3C may claim to be against trolls, yet at the same time it harbours some of the proponents and feeders of patent trolls. Its founder claims to be against software patents, yet in his working group he has strong advocates of software patents, as we pointed our on numerous occasions several years ago. There's a total lack of credibility right now.

See articles like "Web Daddy Berners-Lee DRMs HTML5 into 2016" and "Web's gatekeepers embrace DRM for next HTML5 standard". To quote

Digital Rights Management isn’t just coming to HTML5 but also HTML 5.1 in 2016 – despite objections from critics.

And also:

The Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) formally accepted a big change recently that could affect future Web standards—a decision that will either change nothing or destroy the Web forever.

This really is just an example aside, since the subject has become mainstream in recently days. Bill Gates despised the Internet since its early days. Perhaps now that it's turning into a channel that Microsoft and its buddy Netflix can control, things are going to gradually change. Similarly, Windows is no longer the most sold operating system; Android is. That's where trolls come into play and the stories we find are self-explanatory/evident. In order to stop disruption of the free market (free as in freedom) we need to identify and crush the schemes perpetrated against it. ⬆