Bonum Certa Men Certa

Microsoft's Patent Troll and Taxman Intellectual Ventures Gets Indirectly Closer to Google (Android/ChromeOS Steward) and to Linux

Nathan MyhrvoldSummary: The world's largest patent troll, composed of literally thousands of shells having been created by Microsoft with significant help from Bill Gates, is widening its reach to to the Google-backed Yieldify and TiVo (through Rovi)

NOBODY denies the fact that Intellectual Ventures (IV) is a patent troll, as per the definition of the term, and also the world's largest one. It's closely connected both to Microsoft and to Bill Gates (at a personal level/capacity), so we pay careful attention to it. We recently criticised IAM for grooming IV and now, based on a rare weekend update, IV speaks to IAM. As the editor put it: "Subsequent to the article’s publication, IV co-founder Peter Detkin got in touch with myself and Kent Richardson to comment on some of what it said; Kent then responded. Both have given me permission to publish their correspondence (note that this has been edited into IAM house style - so, for example, original US spellings have been turned into British English – but there no substantive changes were made)."



We understand why IAM entertains patent trolls' marketing. IAM is, after all, partly funded by patent trolls, for whom it organises reputation-laundering events. It's thus not hard to see why IV might view IAM as an ally rather than a suspicious or critical foe. There's a sort of back-rubbing there.

Google came under fire some days ago because a company it backed has hooked up with IV. The Register's most trollish pundit, who habitually comments in IP Kat since weeks ago, said this (under the words "Um, Google… I thought you hated patent trolls?"):

Yieldify, the Google-backed startup accused of stealing code from British adtech company Bounce Exchange, has been making some unusual friends.

Yieldify has acquired an ancient web patent from III Holdings which was first filed in 2007. III Holdings is better known as Inside Intellectual Ventures, co-founded by Nathan Myhrvold. It has been dubbed “the most hated company in tech” and “the world's biggest patent troll.”

IIV is a “NPE” (non-practicising entity), which gathers up patents and seeks to unlock their value through selling on or licensing the IP. This has been backed up by litigation, such as Samsung, a recipient of one of III’s sueballs.

In a court filing made last week, Yieldify made a request for declaratory judgement in its ongoing case versus Bounce Exchange, citing the IIV patent. This is a request for the case to be thrown out. The complaint also uses the patent in question to lodge an infringement claim against Bounce Exchange.



Here is another report about this, which correctly notes:

The patent wasn't originally Yieldify's, though. Yieldify has purchased the patent from Intellectual Ventures in order to open up a new front in its battle with Bounce Exchange. It was first submitted for approval to the US Patent and Trademark Office back in 2005 by Intellectual Ventures (IV), an organisation that CNET once described as "the most hated company in tech."


There is a little more IV in the mix and it directly impacts Linux because DRM proponent and Linux kernel troublemaker (TiVo) reportedly gets together with a friend of patent trolls like Intellectual Ventures. As a patent maximalist's site put it the other day: "Whether Rovi uses that war chest to attack competition (which becomes harder or easier as the anti-software patent pendulum continues to swing), or to further refine the Bolt and Rovi’s own media guides or both – the acquisition does spell positive for both companies and their stakeholders."

One must remember that any proximity/link between IV and Linux can help Microsoft tax Linux using patents from thousands of different directions (IV has literally thousands of shells or satellites). A lot of patent trolls attack legitimate companies down in Texas and it's hard to tell who they work on behalf of.

Vice has this new sort of 'expose' about Rodney Gilstrap, who was mentioned here before, e.g. in [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. He is the patent trolls' best friend at the court and to quote portions of this rather damning report:

The Small Town Judge Who Sees a Quarter of the Nation’s Patent Cases



[...]

The first thing people tell you about Judge Rodney Gilstrap is that he’s not from Marshall. In the small Texas city (population 24,000) east of Dallas where he presides as a US district court judge, where you’re from matters, and the 59-year-old Gilstrap was actually born in Pensacola, Florida. But because he earned both his BA and his law degree at Baylor University (three hours away in Waco, Texas), has practiced law in Marshall since the 80s, and married a local girl whose family owns the town funeral home, most folks forgive Gilstrap this blight.

[...]

Since taking the bench in 2011—moving literally across the street from his law office into the district courthouse—Gilstrap has become one of the most influential patent litigation judges in the country. In 2015, there were 5,819 new patent cases filed in the US; 1,686 of those ended up in front of Judge Gilstrap. That’s more than a quarter of all cases in the country; twice as many as the next most active patent judge.


Patent trolls are truly an epidemic, but they rely on software patents and corrupt courts (or states that harbour patent trolls for profit, much like tax havens that welcome tax evaders). What's also crucial for everyone to remember is that many patent trolls work at the behest of some corporation lurking in the shadow, targeting its competition to drive prices higher or drive the competition out of the market. Intellectual Ventures already attacks Linux in various ways (from many directions), as we showed here before.

Recent Techrights' Posts

Slop Nihilism is Funded by Big Oil
Eventually human civilisation will destroy itself
Professor Eben Moglen Recovering From Open Heart Surgery
From his public pages (this is not secret)
 
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, September 17, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, September 17, 2025
Slopwatch: Fake Articles, Fake Text, Fake Images, Negative Slant on "Linux"
Google News has lost its value; the signal-to-noise ratio has fallen off a cliff
Gemini Links 17/09/2025: Relax-and-Recover on Proxmox and New Smolweb File Transfer Service
Links for the day
Fact: EFF Got Corrupted by Corporate Money. Microsoft Lunduke (Political Noise): The Issue With EFF is, It Kills Babies.
Microsoft Lunduke - as usual - finds a way to make it about abortions
Pacing Publication Up a Bit
The news cycles have gotten rather light and slow
Links 17/09/2025: Power Outages, Digital Controls, and Attacks on the Mainstream Media (by Insecure and Corrupt Dictators)
Links for the day
Gemini Links 17/09/2025: Flashing LineageOS and ROOPHLOCH
Links for the day
Links 17/09/2025: Long COVID Study, "Exposing Pegasus", and Chatbots Exposing Sensitive Data
Links for the day
Links 17/09/2025: Secret Settlement for Internet Archive and Google’s LLM Slop Summaries Attracting Lawsuits
Links for the day
The True Cost of 'Generative Models'
Funded and promoted by the companies that profit from the waste
'Big Slop' Attacks Contemporary Information/Knowledge and Creative Works, 'Big Copyright' (Cartel) Attacks the Old
Someone at IA will hopefully "blow the whistle" on what they actually agreed
Why We Find It Difficult to Trust Rust
A comparison between C/C++ and Rust
Watching the OSI: Our Series Will Carry on Irrespective of the Chief's 'Resignation'
the OSI isn't even the real guardian of the term "Open Source"
Just What LibreOffice Needs? Another Language? (Rust)
what's all this concern about memory safety?
Many Microsoft Managers Are Leaving
"Hey hi" chaff or chaff about "hey hi" cannot eternally distract from the difficulties inside the company
There Are Red Hat (IBM) Layoffs, But Google News is Infested With Slopfarms
It contributes a lot to misinformation and it encourages plagiarism
Tomorrow, Microsoft's Tim Anderson's 'The Register MS' Offshoot Will Have Been Inactive for 2 Months (There's Also a Slop Problem)
We've already caught The Register MS using LLM slop for articles
Microsoft's Chief Legal Officer Leaves Microsoft After Nearly 30 Years
And not retiring
Even Windows Users Are Having Problems With "Secure Boot"
When it comes to security - Microsoft strives for the very opposite
Another Competition Crime of Microsoft, Long Facilitated and Advocated by a Bad Actor, Who is Funded by a Third Party to Commit Extortion Against People Who Have Correctly and Repeatedly Warned About It for Over 13 Year
We must always go back to the core issues
3 More Reasons to Replace Mozilla Firefox With LibreWolf
Thankfully there are de-enshittified versions of Firefox
USA Not a Place for Free Speech
In America, as in the US, the attacks seem more enhanced or advanced these days
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, September 16, 2025
IRC logs for Tuesday, September 16, 2025
Links 17/09/2025: Google Layoffs in "Hey Hi" (AI), Perplexity Hit With More "Hey Hi" (Plagiarism) Lawsuits
Links for the day
Gemini Links 17/09/2025: Reclaiming Things in a Digital Age and Moon Phases in CGI
Links for the day
Slopwatch: Google News is Slop, Google News is Plagiarism, Google News is Dying
Google is off the rails
Links 16/09/2025: "The Censorship Alarm Is Ringing in the Wrong Direction" and ASRock Does Microsoft E.E.E. on GNU/Linux
Links for the day
Serious "Breach of Confidentiality of Personal Data" in Europe's Second-Largest Institution, the EPO
Yes, the same EPO that routinely uses "data protection" and "GDPR" as a pretext for hiding or covering up its corruption and white-collar crimes (it even uses that as an excuse for refusing to obey courts' orders)
Adrienne Rockenhaus Says Her Husband Was Arrested for Running Tor and Denied Basic Rights in the United States
the US seems to be getting "russified" in its approach towards Tor
This is What Happens When Microsoft Canonical Lets Decisions on Ubuntu be Made by a Youngster From the British Army (Where He Did Mass Surveillance)
"Is Ubuntu Compromised?"
Back Doored Windows Giving GNU/Linux a Hard Time (Under the Guise of 'Security')
Is this complication intentional? Most likely, yes
Links 16/09/2025: Science, Security, and Conflicts
Links for the day
Gemini Links 16/09/2025: Command-line Options in POSIX Shell and Introducing Acre 0.9
Links for the day
Microsoft 'Secure' Boot Versus Dual Boot With GNU/Linux
they're meant to assume everything is OK
Links 16/09/2025: While Oracle Pretends to be Rich It's Firing About 70 MySQL Workers, "Oracle's Revenge" (Faking Demand With "AI")
Links for the day
Microsoft Has Just Published a New Web Page About "Secure Boot Update Process" (Microsoft Also Admits Issues; PCs Can Stop Booting)
Why was this page issued and published only hours ago?
Microsoft Lunduke: I Spread Hate and Then I Receive Hate
Cry us a river, Microsoft Lunduke
"Use Wayland" Isn't a Bugfix for X (X11 is Still Necessary)
They tell us X is "dead" and we must all be herded into Wayland ASAP
"Disable Secure Boot and Fast Boot. Wipe and Start Over."
At least they didn't say, buy a new computer...
The Oracle Ponzi Scheme
Oracle isn't doing well, but it's nowadays fashionable to say "clown" and "hey hi" to prop up one's stock, even based on nothing at all
The New Head of OSI is an "Hey Hi" (AI) Obsessed Person
when Bryant says "AI" that doesn't mean AI
Taking Out the Battery, Opening Up Your Computer, Just Like a "Normie" Would
At this stage, any person who still says "enable Secure Boot" is misguided or persuaded by companies that sell rootkits
Slopwatch: Serial Sloppers and Slopfarms Still Infesting Google News (Fake 'Articles' About "Linux" Spreading FUD)
searching for "Linux" today yields a lot of FUD
"Governments, local authorities, schools and hospitals can lead by example by procuring only Free Software"
Crossposted from Tux Machines
Cindy Cohn Leaving the Electronic Frontier Foundation While Its Co-founder John Gilmore, Whom She Apparently Helped Oust, Will Celebrate 40 Years of the Free Software Foundation, Inc.
EFF has been busy hoarding GAFAM money, whereas the latter is where all the real activism is done
The Reach of Techrights Has Broadened
We nowadays cover a broader range of issues
"Google is Googlebombing KDE's Project Banana"
So is Google googlebombing KDE's Project Banana? You decide.
Complicating Things for No Actual Benefit, Just Added Risk and More Difficulties Adding GNU/Linux and BSDs
Watch what it's like for people who wish to use BSDs
Some Very Large IRC Networks Are Growing
IRC will turn 38 next year
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, September 15, 2025
IRC logs for Monday, September 15, 2025
Links 16/09/2025: Autumn Party, RPG Planet, and Optical ROOPHLOCH
Links for the day