Zoe Corbyn, The Observer via The Guardian; Nathan Myhrvold: ‘Nasa doesn’t want to admit it’s wrong about asteroids’
"In 2000, you left Microsoft and set up Intellectual Ventures,
which primarily buys and licenses patents. The business is often
vilified as one of the world’s biggest “patent trolls”. Why do you think
people find it so loathsome?
I fundamentally think what we
do is good. It is hard for me to get too worked up about figuring out
why it is bad. Any patent holder who enforces their rights gets called a
patent troll. Silicon Valley feels very threatened by anything that
could challenge its authority. If you are one of the big companies, like
Google or Apple, almost no one can challenge you in the market that
you’re in. But if somebody has a patent, they can ask for a bunch of
money. The more you can get a return from an invention, the better off
the world will be. It will lead to more inventions being funded and more
inventing...
President Trump is going after China’s intellectual property theft. Given your experience, can he succeed in curbing it?
The theft of intellectual property by Chinese companies
is a very serious issue. It’s not just private companies in China or
little companies. A large amount of it is state-owned enterprise. So, it
really is the Chinese government doing it. Exactly how to solve that
issue, I don’t know. You need the Chinese government to be very serious
about it, but so far they haven’t been. In my experience in business,
you mostly do better with negotiating in quiet diplomacy, not with
brinksmanship. But I’ve never built luxury hotels and golf courses.
Maybe it is different there."
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