Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, so this is just a naive suggestion but I'd like to hear some informed discussion on the issue:
Couldn't a company like Intellectual Ventures be prosecuted under some form of antitrust law? There seems to be evidence of predatory behavior and the nature of how they do business seems to violate a few main goals of antitrust law, namely to prohibit agreements or practices that restrict free trading and competition between business and to ban abusive behavior by a firm dominating a market, or anti-competitive practices that tend to lead to such a dominant position.
I'm not talking patent theory 101; I'm talking about the business of what amounts to the securitization of patents for the purpose of extorting money (either from businesses who pay IV as an insurance policy so they won't get sued or from businesses who have to pay settlements for violating a patent).
Unfortunately, that's almost the purpose of patents in general. In many industries patents aren't usually licensed so its even worse. In those you don't extort for money, you have an X year monopoly on a whole technology.
IV is probably the best example of don't hate the player, hate the game. They've looked at the game and figured out how to play it. It's like the expert Scrabble players who know all the Scrabble words, but none of the actual definitions. It's completely legal, but probably not in the original spirit of the game.
Couldn't a company like Intellectual Ventures be prosecuted under some form of antitrust law? There seems to be evidence of predatory behavior and the nature of how they do business seems to violate a few main goals of antitrust law, namely to prohibit agreements or practices that restrict free trading and competition between business and to ban abusive behavior by a firm dominating a market, or anti-competitive practices that tend to lead to such a dominant position.