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Intellectual Ventures and Invention Capital : Financing Inventors and Monetizing Creations : Making Big Money out of Patents : The "New" Software ?

By Andis Kaulins

Intellectual Ventures has been labelled "Intellectual Vultures" as a consequence of its acquisition of 30,000 patents and collection thus far of more than $1 billion in license fees. That is big business. What goes on?

In Investment Firm Hopes to Turn Patents Into Invention Capital Market, Steve Lohr at the New York Times reports on this "nonpracticing entity" - called a patent troll by its detractors - that makes no products of its own but deals in patents only.

The March 2010 Issue of the Harvard Business Review under the title Funding Eureka! features an article written by Nathan Myhrvold, former chief technology officer at Microsoft and Founder and CEO of Intellectual Ventures, in which Myhrvold makes the case that his company is not a patent troll but is trying to "create a capital market for inventions" and "to make applied research a profitable activity that attracts vastly more private investment than it does today".

Is it possible that Myhrvold represents the future of patents?

Full post as published by LawPundit on February 23, 2010 (boomark / email).