Patent Pending Wars

[Selene]

According to Myhrvold, the CEO of Intellectual Ventures, he:

has

more than 100 patents

to his name, and he's cast himself as a man determined to give his fellow inventors their due. In 2000, he founded a company called Intellectual Ventures, which he calls "a company that invests in invention."

However, as occurred in early July:

... the bankrupt tech company Nortel put its 6,000 patents up for auction as part of a liquidation. A bidding war broke out among Silicon Valley powerhouses.

Google said it wanted the patents purely to defend against lawsuits

and it was willing to spend

over $3 billion to get them

. That wasn't enough, though.

The portfolio eventually sold to Apple and a consortium of other tech companies including Microsoft and Ericsson. The price tag: $4.5 billion dollars. Five times the opening bid. More than double what most people involved were expecting. The largest patent auction in history.

As this NPR article concludes,

The big companies — Google, Apple, Microsoft — will probably survive. The likely casualties are the companies out there now that no one's ever heard of that could one day take their place.

This raises ethical questions in the areas of patents, intellectual property and what the best model should be for libertarians, anarchists, mini-anarchist and Objectivists.

Hence, my reason for posting this thread.

Adam

[syrakusos]

... This raises ethical questions in the areas of patents, intellectual property and what the best model should be for libertarians, anarchists, mini-anarchist and Objectivists.

See the reference to Robert Andrew Macfie on my blog. I have antique stock certificates from 1850-1950. On some of them, when there are two or more owners, depending on the state, they will be declared "joint tenants with rights of survivorship and not tenants in common" or in other states "tenants in common." Again, this is for a share of common stock in a corporation. We inherited (interestingly enough) the concepts of property evolved in and appropriate to land. We are trying to live a post-industrial life with pre-industrial legalisms.