So, what is [Intellectual Ventures] actually doing? Buying up loads of patents and licensing them to companies who calculate it’s not worth the fight is patent trolling 101. Yet the scale they’re operating on puts them on new ground, and opens new opportunities. It seems obvious to get corporate investors on board by promising them immunity from patent claims. With enough patents you stop trying to license them one-by-one and just tax each industry at some non-negotiable rate. No doubt they have more tricks I haven’t even thought of, but these potential devices really do make them a new breed of Super Trolls.

…

Now, I don’t really care if one company leeches off the others. But if they want to tax software, they have to attack free software otherwise people will switch to avoid their patent licensing costs. And if you don’t believe some useful pieces of free software could be effectively banned due to patent violations, you don’t think on the same scale as these guys.

Rusty Russell, “Superfreakonomics; Superplug for Intellectual Ventures.“, July 7th, 2010

I’m also opposed to software patents.

Watching Patent Absurdity: how software patents broke the system is time well spent.

Related Posts:

• My own Great Artists Still Steal, March 4, 2010
• VC and principal of Union Square Ventures, Fred Wilson has a lot of great insights and updates on patents.

When ever I start thinking about licensing and it being the suck, I think to Lawrence Lessig‘s keynote presentation at the annual Open Source Convention (OSCON) made on July 24, 2002. My favorite parts are:

• Creativity and innovation always builds on the past.
• The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it.
• Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past.
• Ours is less and less a free society.

O’Reilly Network — Free Culture: Lawrence Lessig Keynote from OSCON 2002

I highly recommend reading, hearing, or viewing the whole talk about a lot more than licensing that Lessig has given more than 100 times. It speaks to why licensing is the suck and presents some of the largest issues facing civilization today.