I Don't "Get" Nathan Mhyrvold, Either

I've seen him give his Powerpoint a few times on how the patent litigation crisis is supposedly a false one and have been left scratching my head. Mike Masnick at TechDirt articulates my feelings...

...Then Mhyrvold is asked about whether or not it's okay for someone to get a patent and then not do anything with it, to which he responds:

I would say, yes, there's nothing wrong with that. And the analogy I would use is, it'd be like saying, "Is it OK for someone to buy a chunk of the business and never show up there?" And the answer is, yes. We call them venture capitalists or shareholders. To have a system of taking risk and building valuable companies, you have to have people that are financiers or have other specialized roles.

That sounds nice, but that analogy doesn't work in the slightest. Patent hoarding isn't like an investor or a shareholder. It's about someone holding onto a patent and then popping up and suing when someone else does something. A shareholder or an investor is a win-win relationship based on a fair transaction. A company gets some money, and the shareholder gets some equity. Patent hoarding is quite different. It's about holding onto a patent and then using it to legally threaten someone else or prevent them from doing work and then demanding money out of them after the fact. To equate that with an investor is simply incorrect.