Muck Fyhrvold

Nathan Myhrvold founded Intellectual Ventures, and proceeded both directly, and through a shadowy shell companies, has proceeded to use dodgy patents, and threat of expensive litigation to extort money from businesses.

Well, we have just had a on the first case that IV put its own name on, and Myhrvold's baby went down in flames:

Intellectual Ventures (IV) is the world's biggest patent-licensing company and boasts of having collected tens of thousands of patents since it was founded in 2000. It's raised about $6 billion from investors over the years, and to recoup that money, it started filing lawsuits over patents a few years ago. In 2013, it launched a new salvo, filing 13 lawsuits against major US banks, including Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, and Capital One.

The Capital One case ended last Wednesday, when a Virginia federal judge threw out the two IV patents that remained in the case. It's the first IV patent case seen through to a judgment, and it ended in a total loss for the patent-holding giant: both patents were invalidated, one on multiple grounds. (An IV case against Motorola went to a jury, but it ended in a mistrial, and no new trial has been scheduled.)

The case was just weeks away from a jury trial, but US District Judge Anthony Trenga didn't let it get that far. In an opinion published Wednesday, Trenga found that IV's patents were simply abstract ideas: "nothing more than the mere manipulation or reorganization of data," he wrote. "At most, the patents describe a more efficient system or method for performing tasks than could be done without a computer, i.e. monitoring expenditures according to preset limits (the '137 Patent) or determining what would appeal to a particular user from a particular website (the '382 Patent.)"

Unfortunately, I can think of no way to make Myhrvold's business model, and those of other patent trolls illegal (as in go to jail), but perhaps we can see some meaningful changes to the law to make this behavior legally untenable.

I hope that Monsanto's in the crosshairs as well.  In many ways, they are worse, because, our lives do not depend on the CWV code on a credit card, but they do depend on food.

H/t Crooks and Liars.