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Intellectual Ventures and universities

By Lawrence B. Ebert, Esq.

Slashdot discusses deals of Intellectual Ventures with universities:

"Intellectual Ventures (IV) will be setting up shop at the top of a Four Seasons this week as Headline Sponsor of the Ready to Commercialize 2008 conference hosted by the University of Texas at Austin. It's the patent firm's 100th university deal, though some, such as Professor Michael Heller at Colombia University, warn against such deals. '... their individual profit comes at the cost of the public ability to innovate. The university's larger mission is to serve the public interest, and some of these deals work against that public interest.'

One comment in the thread: With laws as outrageously stupid as some of the current patent laws, it's frankly time to start ignoring them.

Some of Heller's comments sound very similar to Lemley's in his SSRN piece on universities as patent trolls. [Lemley in trolls: I argue that Universities should take a broader view of their role in technology transfer. University technology transfer ought to have as its goal maximizing the social impact of technology, not merely maximizing the university's licensing revenue. Lemley, of course, favored patentee in Metabolite, which involved a questionable patent claim by a university researcher.]

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http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2008/11/on-intellectual-ventures.html

http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2008/09/more-on-wsj-piece-on-intellectual.html

***IPFrontline has a post on Article One Partners, LLC (www.ArticleOnePartners.com).
This seems to be a hybrid of Peer-to-Patent and Bounty Quest: The community members, or Advisors as Article One calls them, have an opportunity to send in previously hard to find evidence of validity for high profile patents.

Of Bounty Quest, see IPBiz post:

http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2004/07/story-by-ap-on-acaciaeff.html [One-time startup Bounty-Quest set out in 2000 with such a mission. It wanted to debunk questionable patents by letting interested parties offer rewards of $10,000 or more for hard-to-find prior art. But there were few takers, and the business failed.]

Full post as published by IPBiz on November 16, 2008 (boomark / email).