Oh it’s on. It’s on. They just messed with the wrong… Euh, companies. It seems like both Samsung and HTC are gearing up for war, and in doing so, have pretty much made a deal with what could turn out to be the devil. They’ve both partnered with Intellectual Ventures, a company which hoards patents only to license them to others – however, the company has no history of litigation.
Intellectual Ventures was founded by Nathan Myhrvold (former CTO of Microsoft) and Edward Jung back in 2000. In addition to a small number of things developed in its own laboratory, the company has reportedly hoarded over 30000 patents. It is important to note that the few things it did develop on its own have not been superficial – for instance, they’ve been awarded with the MIT Technology Review Top 10 Emerging Technologies in 2009 for a safer nuclear reactor design.
Both Samsung and HTC have signed a deal with Intellectual Ventures, giving both of them access to this massive patent pool. Obviously, Samsung and HTC also hand over their patent portfolios to Intellectual Ventures, allowing them to manage them. A pretty decent pool of patents to defend themselves with against patent aggressors like Apple and Oracle, I’d say.
“HTC is one of the fastest growing companies in the mobile phone industry, and it understands the value of actively protecting its invention rights,” said Peter Detkin, founder and vice chairman at Intellectual Ventures, “Given HTC’s innovativeness in developing some of the industry’s first smartphones and its continued development of some of the world’s most advanced products, HTC is forward-thinking with its IP practices and is working with IV to mitigate its IP risk.”
While I understand HTC joining hands with Intellectual Ventures (HTC is relatively young), I’m not entirely sure why Samsung would need to sign such a deal. Samsung is huge, and supplies all sorts of chips and components to just about everyone in the business, so it would seem Samsung is pretty safe from patent lawsuits. Of course, it could be that Samsung and HTC are actively working together on this, and are simply using Intellectual Ventures as an intermediary.
Samsung has not yet been involved in any patent suits, but obviously, any suits against Android hurt Samsung’s mobile phone business as well. While I loath the kind of patent hoarding Intellectual Ventures does, I can sympathise with both Samsung and HTC taking defensive action against patent aggressors like Microsoft, Apple, and Oracle.
So they’ve taken their 40 pieces of Silver and got into bed with a troll.
Their next step will be to sue every other mobile phone maker as well as more than a few PC makers just bo be sure.
Their targets will (as has been seen already) retaliate with their own lawsuits.
The end result will be MAD (Mutually assured destruction). The ONLY winners will be the myriad of lawyers scrambling to get on this particular gravy train.
The sure fire losers will be us poor consumers.
The sooner the USSC declares them null & void the better but there are far too many lawyers with their snouts in the trough. Remember, who makes the laws? What percentage of the lawmakers are lawyers? You do the math.
How are they going to sue other manufacturers? They licensed the patents, they didn’t acquire them, and IV doesn’t have a history of litigation.
This is a purely defensive posture that protects them from potential litigation from the patent holders that IV represents, and a potential opportunity to counter additional third-party patent claims via the patents they now have access to.
I’m not sure IV are so reprehensible… You say they produce knowledge also, I don’t think many patent trolls do that. A non-litigeous history, coupled with the fact they don’t just acquire paptents to grow fat off them, means they may actually be a legitimate “information company”. I mean, put aside that the patents shouldn’t exist at all in many cases…
Edit for touchscreen typing and the belief I’m infallible.
Edited 2010-11-24 21:49 UTC
I think they should be called Intellectual Vultures
Edited 2010-11-24 22:10 UTC
Care to elaborate on that? I thought I read this in the item:
Or maybe you think any patent holder is a vulture?
Whilst I can see how some would like to brush this off as a patent troll the fact that the company actually designs things is quite a bit different to a company that buys up or patents vague concepts in order to try to cash in.
Personally I have no problem considering a innovative and technical design as an application of a patent (software/business method patents excluded unconditionally).
Nevertheless, it is sad that with deals like this just maintain the minefield upon which newcomers maul themselves on.
Edited 2010-11-24 23:48 UTC
At the same time, this event does illustrate that patents are now effectively preventing innovation and competition and barring new entrants or small ventures from entry into a market.
This is the precise opposite effect that patents are supposed to promote.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_Act_of_1790
Surely US legislators can realise this, and begin the steps towards sorely needed patent reform, or even better, elimination of patents.
Edited 2010-11-25 00:32 UTC
Intellectual Ventures is biggest patent troll around, or call it patent Ogre.
It is founded by exMicrosoftie Nathan Myhrwold and it is rumoured that Bill Gates is investing in IV, and that Microsoft given away first batch of patents to IV when it is founded.
Tricky part is that they don’t sue, instead they loan patents to other parties to sue. They call those parties “commercialization partner”.
There is video on their site where Nathan the troll talks about that, using cheeky euphemisms, of course
http://www.intellectualventures.com/Home.aspx
Site Techrights.org (which should we thank for exposing Novell and Microsoft) is keeping an eye on IV.
http://techrights.org/wiki/index.php/Intellectual_Ventures
There is all kind of evidence there.
what?
How can others sue for patent infringement on patents they don’t own?
I have no idea, but perhaps they sell a patent to a partner and get a percentage of the money earned through lawsuits?
“Samsung has not yet been involved in any patent suits”
Well, according to The Guardian smartphones patent wars diagram
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2010/nov/01/smartphone-pa…
Samsung has already stepped on the battle ring.
I see Apple being sued 8 times to their own counter sue of 3 times.
Yes. Apple is certainly the aggressor. They are actually suing only large corporations. (HTC, NOKIA and MOTOROLA)
They are counter suing in two of those cases (MOTO, NOKIA) and suing MOTO.
🙂
pica
…when Oracle wins the infringement suit against Google. They have the Googs dead to rights.
The one who told us that we could reverse ‘global warming’ by performing geoengineering – so we go from something that ‘could’ affect us to genuinely fucking about with the planet in a way we can’t reverse.
It’s scary that people like this even exist, let alone being in positions where they can suggest these things.
Acacia are patent trolls, who buy patents and go after other companies and schools. However, they have engineers which also write patents as well. Just because a company has made a few contributions to society does not wave the possibility they will act accordingly. However, perhaps this is a way to join all the patents under one umbrella, to prevent all these lawsuits from happening, wonder if Motorola will be next to join.