In
today’s New York Times, Steve
Lohr
has a write
up and a blog
post about the highly controversial ‘Intellectual Ventures.’ Due to
their intensively secretive
nature and unusual business models (Lohr reports: “Intellectual
Ventures, a secretive $5 billion investment firm has scooped up
30,000 patents, inspire admiration and angst,” as a result “Several
analysts say that Intellectual Ventures has been
primarily a master practitioner of exploiting the current rules of the
game to
its advantage”), IV has long sparked deep suspicion.
It is no secret that IV has been
substantially
growing its patent portfolio for the past few years. However, one new
nugget
about a different kind of growth jumped out from Lohr’s story:
Intellectual Ventures
spent more than $1 million on lobbying last year, according to public
filings
compiled by OpenSecrets.org.
In the three most recent election cycles — 2006, 2008 and 2010 —
Intellectual
Ventures executives, led by Mr. Myhrvold, have contributed more than $1
million
to Democratic and Republican candidates and committees.
While we’ve never seen this previously
reported, it should come as no big surprise. Over the last several
years,
Congress has taken a number of stabs at patent reform. Should our system
see
the overhaul reformers are pushing for, certain types of abusive
business models
may be in great danger. Certainly,
companies that are merely in the business of charging for “being
infringed” by
productive U.S. enterprises have much to fear from patent reform.
IV’s desire for influence is
telling of their desire to protect their business model – whatever it
may be. Some IV revenue comes from licensing
deals. Given the fiercely tight-lipped temperament of IV, it is unclear
where
additional revenue may come, from though IV has long held out the threat
of
litigation (but, they claim,
never acted on it). However, Lohr in his informative blog post that
accompanied
the initial story, shines some new light on this. Regarding one
particular case
involving a suit against Eastman Kodak, IV admits involvement:
Donald Merino, senior
vice
president of licensing for Intellectual Ventures, said that the company
did
step in, but only after the shell company had started litigation. It
bought or
licensed a handful of patents from the shell company, and then licensed
them
back to the shell company, represented by the Niro firm.
Consider: benevolent or litigious? Of
course, IV refused to answer who
shares in the monetary outcome of the suit.
