Ever had
a leaky ceiling? You can place a bucket under it and delay the inevitable, but
ultimately the steady dripping is going to take its toll and that bucket is
going to overflow. Eventually, the ceiling may even collapse.
The
latest drip in the unraveling of secretive Intellectual Ventures came last week
in the form of a Wall
Street Journal article
“[IV VP of Licensing Don] Merino says some such deals have
a ‘back end.’ In other words, his firm can receive some revenue generated by
the company that buys its patents, whether through a lawsuit or some other
means. But IV does not control what the buyer does with them.”
IV has
long bragged of its record of never having filed a patent infringement lawsuit.
However, these WSJ revelations
suggest that they are achieving the same end product – revenue – by licensing
patents to NPEs more than willing to sue. They are simply going through the
back door.
Indeed,
this is not the first article to note IV’s propensity to sell patents to
litigious NPEs. A recent Dow
Jones article
A
September Recorder article titled “Intellectual Ventures
Takes Indirect Route to Court” opened the lid on IV having sold patents to
a firm that used them to sue Kodak for infringement:
“With its new practice of selling off patents to third
parties, litigation is much more likely. It’s similar to the ‘catch and
release’ model used for some time by other patent-holding companies. That’s a
friendly sounding name for a threat that goes like this: Take a license because
we’re going to sell the patent on the open market—and you never know what
unscrupulous and lawsuit-prone troll is going to buy it.”
As the
steady drip continues, one can only wonder how long the infamous IV machine can
sustain its image of benevolence.
