Traul Allen, photo by msprague
ABOUT a month ago we produced and presented a factual case to show that Microsoft is a leading producer of patent trolls. Bill Gates plays his role with Searete, his patents pusher (pushing friends' patents), and funding for a former Microsoft CTO, who is now inarguably the world's largest patent troll. More recently it turned out that Microsoft's co-founder Traul Allen also decided to enter the patent-trolling business and despite Todd Bishop's obsession with these selfish people (Microsoft boosters have endless admiration for money-makers from Microsoft), anybody who know them personally can attest to their endangerment to industry and society at large. They just have a lot or PR operations going and that's why people sometimes view them as "nice" people. It's clearly a façade; That's an observation that's increasing being made by other Web sites too. Over the past few months we saw systematic grooming of the world's biggest patent troll (and a bully too). Some of the latest Myhrvold grooming/PR comes from Seattle although there are others who did this PR routine last week [1, 2]. They promoted a cookbook along with Bill Gates (in his Twitter account). Nathan Myhrvold has resorted to PR like Gates did because just like Gates he is damaging society a great deal and the only way to hide it is to buy a lot of positive publicity and pretend/spin his actions as positive (or look at totally off-topic activities).
“Over the past few months we saw systematic grooming of the world's biggest patent troll (and a bully too).”As for Traul Allen, the LA Times is looking into his case of massive trolling and it does not look good at all: "Departing staff members signed nondisclosure and non-disparagement agreements, which may explain why the inventors whose patents are listed in the lawsuit have not been heard to comment; of the 11 inventors on the four patents I was able to locate (out of 19 individuals), only two responded to my request for comment, one by politely begging off on the phone, the other by referring me to a website updating his latest work and pleading that he's awaiting advice of counsel before saying more."
Not so long ago Traul Allen too began his PR crusade. Those who are not immune to PR might actually fall for it and believe that the world's richest people are also largest donators (not in absolute terms, never mind tax exemptions) and nicest people. Later in the week we'll elaborate on it. Bill Gates, for example, is still getting richer. ⬆