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
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