Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/11/02/dead-on-arrivalstar.html
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Sorry, but someone already holds the rights to valuing things at a dollar
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Arrivalstar; where are they now, eh?
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Research shows that companies sued for patent infringement later invest less in R&D.
My guess is everyone invests less in Research and Development these days. Hard to justify business activities that don’t generate revenue within the same quarter, ya know? How would that look to your investors?
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I wonder the business reason for the $1 valuation. Is it honesty? Tax liability? Is there some factor in bankruptcy law that makes having less assets useful to the owners?
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These people certainly don’t seem like nice people, but “most notorious?” They seem pretty obscure. From the headline I was expecting that Nathan Myhrvold and his “Intellectual Ventures” had gone bust.
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30 rue de St-Jean
CH-1203 Geneva, Switzerland apparently
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If you file for bankruptcy, and you claim your collection of Fabergé pineapples is worth $300million, then you’re going to be expected to pay your creditors up to $300million, i.e. bankruptcy only protects you if you don’t have any way to pay your debts. So, yeah, it’s not in your interests to overstate how much money you have.
Hopefully this will lead to criminal prosecutions, since it seems someone must have perjured themselves somewhere if they were saying these patents were valuable (for purposes of suing people) yet also worthless (for purposes of bankruptcy).
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Hey, I’ll give them a dollar! Then I’ll sue Uber and Lyft for a dollar each… instant 100% profit!
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They can get out of that one fairly easily since the court claims would be asserting that the patents are valuable and it’s losing those claims that lead to the bankruptcy.
So, when they filed the claims they can say they legitimately thought that the patents were valuable. As long as they were either settling cases for $$$ or winning cases, they had good reason to say they were right.
When they lost the claims, they found out that they were in fact wrong, revised the value and went into liquidation.
I think the difficulty might come in the intermediate period between starting to lose cases/getting legal advice that the patents were completely unenforceable and filing for bankruptcy.
Does the US have anything like ‘wrongful trading’, i.e. continuing to trade while insolvent?
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I’ll allow the use of “Comic Sans” here.
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"West African Investment Trust,"
That just screams sketchy.
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You’d be wrong. R&D investment is up globally, +3% in North America and +6% in Asia.
Uh, are we buying these patents? Someone tell me someone less-than-evil is buying these things?
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