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:
“Le Corbusier was the sort of relentlessly rational intellectual that only France loves wholeheartedly, the logician who flies higher and higher in ever-decreasing circles until, with one last, utterly inevitable induction, he disappears up his own fundamental aperture and emerges in the fourth dimension as a needle-thin umber bird.”
—Tom Wolfe (b. 1931)
“Wine and cheese are ageless companions, like aspirin and aches, or June and moon, or good people and noble ventures ...”
—M.F.K. Fisher (1908–1992)