09.14.09
Nathan Myhrvold Connected to Father of Patent Trolling, Ray Niro
Summary: A clear connection is found between the world’s biggest patent bully and the world’s biggest patents hoarder, who is financially backed by Microsoft and Bill Gates
AS LONGTIME trackers of this patent trolls arena may know, Ray Niro is not only a vicious bully but he is also considered the father of patent trolling. He not only attacks companies that actually produce goods (unlike him) but he is also attacking his critics using lawsuits.
We finally have this long update about a case regarding one critic whom Ray Niro decided to bully by putting a bounty on his head and then suing not only the critic but his employer also [1, 2, 3, 4, 5].
Legal bloggers writing about intellectual property matters are sure to take note of a trial set to start Monday in Tyler, Texas. It pits East Texas intellectual property litigator Eric Albritton against Silicon Valley tech company Cisco Systems Inc.
Albritton alleges in his June 16, 2008, federal court complaint that Richard Frenkel, a one-time in-house lawyer at Cisco, defamed him in anonymous postings on Frenkel’s Patent Troll Tracker blog in October 2007.
In March 2008, after Frenkel outed himself as the Patent Troll Tracker blogger, Albritton filed the defamation suit against Cisco, Frenkel, another Cisco in-house lawyer and a corporate spokesman.
Frenkel will hopefully win this case against a monster which terrifies the entire industry. Who would befriend such a monster? Well, Microsoft’s former CTO on the face of it. Watch this report from The Prior Art Blog, which indicates that Ray Niro is apparently also an attack dog of Nathan Myhrvold/Intellectual Ventures, currently the world’s largest patent troll that resorted to massive-scale racketeering.
Today’s Recorder has a story revealing that patent-holding giant Intellectual Ventures appears to be connected to a patent lawsuit recently filed in Chicago against Kodak and CDW Corp. Picture Frame Innovations, LLC v. Eastman Kodak Company et al., 09-cv-04888, N.D. Illinois. Intellectual Ventures was founded by former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold (pictured at right).
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Ray Niro says “IV is not involved in any way, shape, or form” in the Picture Frame Innovations lawsuit, but neither he nor IV will answer the key question: whether the patent-holding company has any financial interest in the litigation.
Mysterious, eh?
Had the Secret Services actually done something useful, they would be going after the likes of Icahn, Myhrvold, and Niro. Instead they are kept occupied with ’small potatoes’ whose damage to industry and human kind is negligible in comparison. Stephen Hawking must be turning in his wheelchair seeing what became of his former student. █
“Small enterprises generally adopt a rather negative position towards the current increasing granting of patents for software and algorithms because they fear that these will hamper or eventually even impede their work (more than 85%).” —German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), Study of the Innovation Performance of German Software Companies, 2006, p. 86
