Every time stories like this come up, there's a line like the above. And every time, I wonder: Why is this relevant? I could say equally well that Stripe is a company with no business model outside of taking money from credit cards; it doesn't mean that they're bad people.
The fact is, companies out-source all the time; why is out-sourcing patent infringement lawsuits any worse than out-sourcing credit card processing, overdue account collections, or web design?
If you're interested in maximizing the amount of useful stuff produced by the economy, having patents sold off to Intellectual Ventures is far better than having them continue to be owned by companies which want to do nothing other than shut down their competition.
This is actually an interesting point. Both collection agents and patent trolls go about asking people to pony up the payment for goods (to put it colloquially) and they both do it on behalf of a third party, for whom doing it by themselves will involve a lot more of a hassles.
The distinction comes in the fact that in the case of collection agents, the payments owed to the goods are seemingly legitimate or at least socially accepted (perhaps collection agencies that come about collecting payments after those subscription-renewal or hidden-monthly-fee scams might be construed as as much a nuisance as patent trolls). I guess socially, asking payments for ideas only seems reasonable if the persons going about asking for the payments themselves come up with the idea.
It is a little weird and subtle. Can someone come up with a better distinction?
Why is outsourcing torture any worse than outsourcing web design with WebGL? Extraordinary rendition vs. extraordinary rendering!
Hmm, maybe it has something to do with the nature of the thing being outsourced.
I'm not getting into the issue of whether patents are good or bad; my question here is why do people consider out-sourced patent lawsuits to be so much worse than in-house patent lawsuits?
