Intellectual Ventures is a private company notable for being one of the top-five owners of U.S. patents, as of 2011. Its business model has a focus on developing a large patent portfolio and licensing these patents to companies. Publicly, it states that a major goal is to assist small inventors against corporations. In practice, much of their revenue comes from licensing patents from other corporations and then filing lawsuits for infringement of patents, a controversial practice known as patent trolling.
Intellectual Ventures launched a prototyping and research laboratory in 2009 called Intellectual Ventures Lab which attracted media controversy when the book SuperFreakonomics described its ideas for reducing global climate change. Its employees are predominantly patent attorneys, physicists, engineers and biotechnologists.
Read more about Intellectual Ventures: Overview, Investment Funds, Intellectual Ventures Lab, Controversy
Famous quotes containing the words intellectual and/or ventures:
“I hardly know an intellectual man, even, who is so broad and truly liberal that you can think aloud in his society. Most with whom you endeavor to talk soon come to a stand against some institution in which they appear to hold stock,—that is, some particular, not universal, way of viewing things. They will continually thrust their own low roof, with its narrow skylight, between you and the sky, when it is the unobstructed heavens you would view.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“If one ventures a word with you, will you be offended? But who can keep from speaking?”
—Bible: Hebrew, Job 4:2.
Eliphaz, one of Job’s “comforters,” to Job.