Nathan Myhrvold just jumped out of the shadows with a scary mask on, yelling "Boo!" at Motorola Mobility
Myhrvold's privately held patent-holding firm, Intellectual Ventures, has so far preferred to stay behind the scenes, collecting more technology patents and signing lucrative licensing deals. The lawsuits have mostly been handled through no-name subsidiaries such as Oasis Research, the empty office in Texas at the center of a brilliant NPR chronicle of Intellectual Ventures and our broken patent system.
That's changing now. Myhrvold's feared venture is throwing its considerable weight right at Motorola by filing a patent infringement suit in Delaware. A Motorola-designed "entertainment device" (read: Android smartphone) is allegedly stepping all over six of IV's more than 35,000 patents. IV wants a jury trial and an as-yet unnamed amount of cold, hard damage reparations.
It's not the first suit that IV has filed under its own name, but it is the first in the mobile space where patents have become a white-hot topic lately. Since Motorola is in the process of being swallowed whole by Android godfather Google, you could say that the venture has filed suit against Big G. And, according to legal documents filed in an unrelated, preemptive lawsuit by chip company Xilinx
Assuming that the Googorola merger passes regulatory muster, then, IV is indirectly suing itself.
Now, it's possible that Google signed some easy-to-miss little licensing deal behind closed doors in return for a small ownership interest. German software giant SAP
If all this legal sleight-of-hand action is making your head spin, let me direct you to safer hunting grounds far away from the specter of patent terrors.