It’s been a bad week for Intellectual Ventures – NPR hates them, they might own Lodsys, and they are backed by Apple and Microsoft

It’s been a really tough week for the biggest patent troll in the world, Intellectual Ventures. NPR had an amazing expose on the state of patents in our country last week, software patents in particular, and Intellectual Ventures was the centerpiece. If you read one article on patents this year, it’s probably a pretty good one to go with. The article focuses on how IV has built a giant software patent portfolio on a $4 billion budget, but that they only hold people who have already invented things hostage with the patents, and most software engineers hate patents and think they are nonsense. It’s a solid summary of where software patents stand today, and the story attempts to track down some of the “inventors” and small patent holders involved, mostly with results that are less than encouraging. There’s also some great facts in the piece that few probably knew about IV before – such as the fact that none of the 1,000 or so patents produced from in-house research have ever been licensed to make a real product.

The NPR piece contained another interesting wrinkle I hadn’t seen elsewhere, where the article suggests that IV might own Lodsys, the company that’s been suing tons of mobile app developers. NPR discovered that Lodsys’s primary address is the same as Oasis Research, another non-practicing entity connected to IV – suggesting that IV is gaining financially from Lodsys’s activity, and possibly funding it.

While the NPR piece was probably more damning for IV due to its wide audience and eloquent prose (it’s very entertaining), a Business Insider article from Sunday was just as bad in some ways – the article pointed out that based on recent court filings, it turns out IV is at least partly supported by money from companies like Apple, Cisco, Amazon, Sony, eBay, and Microsoft, though much of that money is probably for the right to not be sued. It is both strange and frightening that the companies most tormented by patent trolls are supporting the biggest in the business. As the NPR piece noted though, IV has made only about $2 billion on it’s $4 billion worth of investments, so the company is actually behind on trolling in some respects, which is a scary thought.

IV had a typical response to the article, as reported by Geekwire: IV strongly disagreed with NPR’s portrayal of their business, and stuck to their guns with claims that “ideas have value” and that they “provide an efficient way for patent holders to get paid for inventions they own”. Of course, IV talks right past the premise of the NPR expose – that while ideas may have value, the patents often don’t reflect the ideas, or are unnecessary to actually getting those ideas to market.