Gregory Aharonian <http://www.bustpatents.com/> has a novel
idea for using the stock market to make money attacking bad
patents. The full article is at
<http://lwn.net/daily/patnews.html>. Here's an excerpt that
describes that the basic idea...
...is to find weak (portfolios of) patents for which, thanks
to the craziness of the Internet, their assignee's stock
price is bubble-ish to the point of having a high price and
volume (creating liquidity and volatility to exploit).
After very thorough prior art searches, one launches
lawsuits to get courts to declare the patents to be invalid
while at the same time buying put options (or just shorting
the stocks for those more risk-adverse). With careful market
timing and public information campaign based on the patent
truly being crap, you could legitimately push down the price
of the stocks and collect on your options/shorts. With
billion dollar valuations, the profit potential would be in
the tens of millions of dollars, if not more. By raising
enough money to implement such a strategy against multiple
companies, a few are bound to hit for the big bucks, given
the statistics of invalidity of most software patents. And
given the lengthy proceedings surrounding such lawsuits,
there are additional profit opportunities as the stocks
rebound then get pounded down again as some of the patents
get invalidated in the court.
I used to think that a similar strategy could be employed
against any company whose valuation is based on proprietary
technology which could be reengineered for substantially less
money than the technology adds to the company's valuation:
reengineer the technology in secret, short the stock, give
the technology away. I'm quite skeptical of this idea now
because I think you'd need to create a perfect substitute
(bug-for-bug in software terms) and do lots of marketing to
ensure your success, both of which require lots of capital.
Mike Linksvayer
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:02:28 MDT