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JPLeRouzic an hour ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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perihelions 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

19 additional comments here,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42086555

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bilekas 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> 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.

	▲	TeMPOraL an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		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.
	▲	blitzar 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		it sounds almost like a no win no fee arrangement

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foolswisdom 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.