France Brevets (FB) was an intellectual property investment fund created by the French State, the National Research Agency (ANR), and the Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations. The entity was created on June 9, 2011 as a simplified joint-stock company. It received 50 million euros. This capital was subsequently increased to 100 million. Its activity was negotiating the rights to the patents for which it was responsible. In particular, it could gather patents to propose a coherent offer to the lessees, or even look for new areas of use. It was part of the French public policy known as competitiveness clusters, to support the country's industrial activity.
Faced with the structure's lack of profitability, pointed out several times by the Court of Auditors, the French State requested the cessation of France Brevets's activity, a decision ratified on October 20, 2022, by the board of directors.
France Brevets is criticized for having a "patent troll" type of activity and is taking legal action against companies such as the Taiwanese HTC or the Korean LG without industrial production.
In addition, the granting of public subsidies to an SAS would be contrary to Article 107 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU). Therefore the very status of France Brevets would be illegal.
> France Brevets was set to receive 35% of any revenue related to “monetizing and enforcement” of the patent, with Burley agreeing to file at least one patent infringement lawsuit within a year, and collect a “total minimum Gross Revenue of US $100,000” within 24 months, or the patent rights would be given back to France Brevets.
This is insane to me, it sounds almost like the patent holders are leasing out patents to anyone who is willing to work as a patent troll and chance their arm at some payouts, otherwise they have to return the Patent?
I mean that just sounds like a new level of low for patent troll farming entirely.
It's what happens when someone realizes some useful construct could be treated as first-class citizen[0] in the financial sense.
Much like in modern programming languages[1], you can "hold a function in your hands" - pass it as value and return it and assign to variables, in finance someone notices, "hey, this thing can be packaged up like an asset and sold/leased/leveraged". Here, someone figures a business model - "I have a patent, patent trolls make money threatening people with patents -- hey, let me lend them my patent and ask for a cut!".
For some reason, in programming this leads to good thing; in the economy, it leads to bad things.
Just wait for when someone figures out how to make securities out of loaned patents and then package them up into bulk-tradeable assets.
- The first part is the good part, where people say something like "increasing liquidity provides a useful service, we can move money around more efficiently, so it gets to the people doing actual things faster."
This works in my opinion if financial services play a small role in the economy.
However, much like a programming language, if you have a massive project with 75 layers of abstraction, its own custom scripting language with multiple versions supported and used in different areas of the same codebase, it really is a waste of everyone's time and only serves to retain the jobs of the developers that understand the mess
- This leads to the bad outcome, where financial processes become labyrinthine and hide risk, and massive effort must be spent on the services without achieving useful work at the end
You’re right that some assets have been packaged to negative effect but there are clear examples of the opposite - futures are stabilize commodity prices, MBSs decrease volatility for investors which increases access to underserved SES profiles, carbon credits incentivize companies to decrease emissions, IP creates an incentive to innovate in a way that the public eventually benefits from.
I’d be curious to know what distinguishes assetization that creates negative externalities vs positive. Probably something about assetization that decouples the value of the underlying good or service from the created asset?
You can fuck a program up by calling an integer that you thought was a function but first class functions are still useful.
That "first-class citizen" idea involves hiding information. You don't have to worry about the details of what it means to hold a function in your hands; you get to just pass it around and work at a higher level of abstraction.
Abstractions which hide information are often good when that information is irrelevant, and in programming you usually have people working together to try to create a better program, so the technique is only applied when somebody thinks it's beneficial.
In legal and financial spaces, however, the incentive for misconduct is high. Rather than abstract away irrelevant details to create a better product, all the dirty laundry is hidden so that the fancy, glittery bits are all their marks see.
Q. So how do you come to own something if you never paid for it with money?
A. I wouldn't be able to explain it very well. That would be a better question for Mavexar.
Q. Well, you're the owner?
A. Correct.
Q. How do you know you're the owner if you didn't pay anything for the patent?
A. Because I have the paperwork that says I'm the owner.
From the French Wikipedia:
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/France_Brevets
France Brevets (FB) was an intellectual property investment fund created by the French State, the National Research Agency (ANR), and the Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations. The entity was created on June 9, 2011 as a simplified joint-stock company. It received 50 million euros. This capital was subsequently increased to 100 million. Its activity was negotiating the rights to the patents for which it was responsible. In particular, it could gather patents to propose a coherent offer to the lessees, or even look for new areas of use. It was part of the French public policy known as competitiveness clusters, to support the country's industrial activity.
Faced with the structure's lack of profitability, pointed out several times by the Court of Auditors, the French State requested the cessation of France Brevets's activity, a decision ratified on October 20, 2022, by the board of directors.
France Brevets is criticized for having a "patent troll" type of activity and is taking legal action against companies such as the Taiwanese HTC or the Korean LG without industrial production.
In addition, the granting of public subsidies to an SAS would be contrary to Article 107 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU). Therefore the very status of France Brevets would be illegal.
19 additional comments here,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42086555
> France Brevets was set to receive 35% of any revenue related to “monetizing and enforcement” of the patent, with Burley agreeing to file at least one patent infringement lawsuit within a year, and collect a “total minimum Gross Revenue of US $100,000” within 24 months, or the patent rights would be given back to France Brevets.
This is insane to me, it sounds almost like the patent holders are leasing out patents to anyone who is willing to work as a patent troll and chance their arm at some payouts, otherwise they have to return the Patent?
I mean that just sounds like a new level of low for patent troll farming entirely.
It's what happens when someone realizes some useful construct could be treated as first-class citizen[0] in the financial sense.
Much like in modern programming languages[1], you can "hold a function in your hands" - pass it as value and return it and assign to variables, in finance someone notices, "hey, this thing can be packaged up like an asset and sold/leased/leveraged". Here, someone figures a business model - "I have a patent, patent trolls make money threatening people with patents -- hey, let me lend them my patent and ask for a cut!".
For some reason, in programming this leads to good thing; in the economy, it leads to bad things.
Just wait for when someone figures out how to make securities out of loaned patents and then package them up into bulk-tradeable assets.
--
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-class_citizen
[1] - And in Lisp since before most people here were born.
> in the economy, it leads to bad things
there are two parts to this
- The first part is the good part, where people say something like "increasing liquidity provides a useful service, we can move money around more efficiently, so it gets to the people doing actual things faster."
This works in my opinion if financial services play a small role in the economy.
However, much like a programming language, if you have a massive project with 75 layers of abstraction, its own custom scripting language with multiple versions supported and used in different areas of the same codebase, it really is a waste of everyone's time and only serves to retain the jobs of the developers that understand the mess
- This leads to the bad outcome, where financial processes become labyrinthine and hide risk, and massive effort must be spent on the services without achieving useful work at the end
You’re right that some assets have been packaged to negative effect but there are clear examples of the opposite - futures are stabilize commodity prices, MBSs decrease volatility for investors which increases access to underserved SES profiles, carbon credits incentivize companies to decrease emissions, IP creates an incentive to innovate in a way that the public eventually benefits from.
I’d be curious to know what distinguishes assetization that creates negative externalities vs positive. Probably something about assetization that decouples the value of the underlying good or service from the created asset?
You can fuck a program up by calling an integer that you thought was a function but first class functions are still useful.
That "first-class citizen" idea involves hiding information. You don't have to worry about the details of what it means to hold a function in your hands; you get to just pass it around and work at a higher level of abstraction.
Abstractions which hide information are often good when that information is irrelevant, and in programming you usually have people working together to try to create a better program, so the technique is only applied when somebody thinks it's beneficial.
In legal and financial spaces, however, the incentive for misconduct is high. Rather than abstract away irrelevant details to create a better product, all the dirty laundry is hidden so that the fancy, glittery bits are all their marks see.
it sounds almost like a no win no fee arrangement
It doesn't seem like there was an additional recent event here, but the article summarizes the activity so far.
The ipde.com blog has many posts covering the events as they happened: https://ipde.com/blog/tag/mavexar/, the author Andrew_Russell is also on HN.
>> Just ridiculous...
Q. So how do you come to own something if you never paid for it with money? A. I wouldn't be able to explain it very well. That would be a better question for Mavexar.
Q. Well, you're the owner? A. Correct.
Q. How do you know you're the owner if you didn't pay anything for the patent? A. Because I have the paperwork that says I'm the owner.
How dumb do you have to be to do this after the Prenda Law saga...