Nathan Myhrvold's Patent Firm Licensing Revenue Surged
March 04 2011 - 6:47AM
Dow Jones News
Nathan Myhrvold said Thursday that his high-profile invention
and patenting firm, Intellectual Ventures, has been enjoying a boom
in licensing revenue recently, thanks to its trove of intellectual
property.
During an evening appearance at The Wall Street Journal's
ECO:nomics Conference in Santa Barbara, Calif., Myhrvold--a former
Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) executive--mentioned that Intellectual
Ventures saw $700 million in licensing revenue last year.
An Intellectual Ventures spokeswoman confirmed the figure, and
added that the firm's total licensing revenue to date amounts to
roughly $2 billion. Bellevue, Wash.-based Intellectual Ventures was
founded by Myhrvold in 2000.
Myhrvold's firm has drawn widespread attention for the quality
of the thinkers who help it to conjure new concepts, and for its
stockpiling of legally protected ideas. Intellectual Ventures
boasts of having over 30,000 patents.
"Part of our idea is we don't create products," Myhrvold said on
Thursday, likening his firm to an advertising agency or law firm
that provides brain power but doesn't necessarily make
anything.
"I'd like to channel billions of dollars into funding new
inventions," Myhrvold said, before pausing and then adding he's
actually already achieving that goal. Intellectual Ventures has
raised over $5 billion from backers.
While boosting its licensing revenue of late, Intellectual
Ventures has also begun to attempt to enforce its intellectual
property rights in court.
In December, Intellectual Ventures filed lawsuits against nine
different technology firms, including Symantec Corp. (SYMC) and
Trend Micro Inc. (TMICY) Intellectual Ventures alleged that the
firms chose "to ignore our requests for good-faith negotiations and
discussions" about licensing agreements.
One exception to Intellectual Ventures' focus on crafting
legally protected ideas and not companies has been TerraPower LLC,
a developer of nuclear-reactor technology spawned by the firm.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates serves as chairman at
TerraPower, which has also drawn investment from venture
capitalists, including Vinod Khosla.
Myhrvold, who served as chief technology officer at Microsoft,
said of TerraPower: "In this case, we created our own nuclear
reactor company because, for this idea to be taken seriously, tens
of millions of dollars of additional engineering work needed to be
done."
TerraPower is developing reactors that can theoretically run for
extended periods on depleted uranium, rather than depending on
regular doses of enriched uranium.
-John Letzing; 415-439-6400; AskNewswires@dowjones.com
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