Is Intellectual Ventures (IV) really the ‘King of Patent Trolls’? If so, the company has done its best to earn the title.

Objectively speaking, the research credentials of founder Nathan Myhrvold are impressive. After studying under none other than Dr. Stephen Hawking himself, Myrhvold started up a software company (in the Ancient '80s, no less, when tech companies were still mostly run by tech people) which got snapped up by Microsoft. While there, Myhrvold founded Microsoft Research, where he met IV co-founder Edward Jung; no slouch himself, Jung is well-recognized for (among other things) his work in biomedical research.

Depending on how critically one views the current system of patents and licensing, the ‘patent troll’ label can be applied to any number of legitimate corporations with active R&D departments. All it takes is one or two aggressive moves by the legal department ... but nobody can fail to see a vast difference between, say, Apple’s arguably overzealous assertions of who may be “slavishly copying” their designs, versus the company’s backdoor dealings with non-manufacturing (non) entities.

Likewise, the ‘behavior’ of Intellectual Ventures makes it very difficult to focus on the company’s stated devotion to research and innovation (and yes, it’s getting very hard to remember a day when the ubiquitous term ‘innovation’ didn’t automatically ring doublespeak alarm bells).

In the now-classic 2006 Fortune article about the company, Myrhvold stated, "I've never filed a patent lawsuit. I hope never to file a patent lawsuit. That may be unrealistic, but it would be great if I could avoid doing it .... Lawsuits are a ridiculous way to do business."

This has been thrown back in IV’s face nearly as many times as the apocryphal Gates ‘640k of memory’ quote. To give Myhrvold due credit, it was nearly four years before his company was ‘forced’ to take to the courts ... officially, anyways. By the time the article was written, various shell companies and non-disclosed partners had already begun the process of securing IV’s revenue stream via litigation.

It’s the very nature of the Intellectual Ventures beast that clouds the exact determination of just how many of these lawsuits and shell companies exist. The company takes great pains to conceal the "true scope and nature of its IP portfolio" in a recently-released "Patent and Technology Market Report" that tried to connect many of the dots. I’d certainly praise the authors’ diligence and litigation-defying bravery ... except for the fact that the shameless PR 'news' spam and exorbitant cost of the full report (a hair under $10000, a little rich for MY blood!) seems to be treading similarly opportunistic (if not ethically gray) waters.

Perhaps the truly remarkable theme of the Fortune article is Myhrvold’s argument that there’s no “litigation crisis” -- followed up by Microsoft’s IP czar David Kaefer, who (even in 2006) was probably not the first to argue that so-called “patent aggregators” actually "reduce litigation" ... and, of course, ‘encourage innovation’ -- which, as the post-2006 Wall Street shenanigans have proven all too well, can mean little more than ‘make money by any means necessary’. It seems self-evident that there’s no lack of patent litigation in the current climate -- but, uh, perhaps there simply aren’t enough companies like Intellectual Ventures to stem the tide ...