Intellectual Ventures, Nathan Myhrvold's Patent Trolling Firm, Adds Yet Another Lawsuit (Motorola) to the Licensing Legal Scrum

What do you call it when a company that doesn't actually make a product sues a company that does make a product, claiming that the product that was made is owned by the company that didn't make it?

For former Microsoftie Nathan Myhrvold,l you call it an average weekday.

Myhrvold, as many are aware, runs Intellectual Vultures--I mean Ventures, a technology firm that specializes in acquiring patents and then hoarding them in a dark, damp cave until some company that actually makes things tries to invent a product that uses anything close to the technology being hoarded.

That's when the trap is sprung, and said company either pays IV handsomely for a license to use the technology or gets sued in court.

As All Things D reports today, for Motorola Mobility, it's the lawsuit treatment.

Intellectual Ventures filed suit Thursday against Motorola Mobility, saying that the company is infringing on its patents and refuses to take a license to its technology.

. . . "Intellectual Ventures has successfully signed licensing agreements with many of the top handset manufacturers in the world, and has been in discussions with Motorola Mobility for some time," Chief Litigation Counsel Melissa Finocchio [lol] said in a statement. "Unfortunately, we have been unable to reach agreement on a license."

D notes Oracle v. Google, Apple v. HTC, and Microsoft v. Barnes & Noble as just a few examples of the never-ending patent wars that are dominating the tech world's legal dockets right now.

But IV alone can (and likely will) clog up a civil court system for years with its list of lawsuits.

Here's a screengrab of the current list of civil suits launched by Intellectual Ventures in only the last two years.

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