They are extortionists and vultures. Their business model is to buy cheap patents from people who just do pure research. Then they go and sue the pants off people who do real work and make a honest living by doing things that make real products.
So I don't know how you can say they need to be proven guilty when they plainly state what they are doing.
And, as far as the patent buying goes, I don't really see a moral hazard with arbitrage. Either the market for patents is really inefficient and they're reaping rewards for exploiting that, or they're actually (gasp) providing a service to the market by connecting companies to institutions, and they're being compensated for it. Either way, I'm thumbs up on the enterprise.
Doing pure research isn't making an honest living?
After all, if one can't make money off of a thing purchased from a professor, there's no reason to buy said thing from a professor. Is it wrong for professors to make money from what they invent? In many cases, the school also makes money. Is that wrong?
Or, is it just wrong for middlemen to buy and resell? In other words, professors should only license to end users.
Note that you've already excluded "publish your invention and charge other people to use it".
Myhrvold told the WSJ that he acknowledges facing resistance from companies he targets for licenses. But his patent inventory gives him leverage to extract settlements without litigation. "I say, 'I can't afford to sue you on all of these, and you can’t afford to defend on all these,'" he said.
http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2008/09/17/invention-capitalism-the...
It sounds like IV's general strategy is a carpet-bombing approach -- coming up with so many tangentially related patents that it doesn't matter how many are invalid, because proving it would cost too much in legal fees, lost sales, or investor confidence.
If you assume IV is legitimately innovating, then all these companies must have been willfully violating multiple patents (directly implementing them from the patent documents)... because otherwise these companies have all come up with the same innovations independently, and the frequency with which this occurs implies that the innovations are actually "obvious to someone skilled in the field" and hence not patentable.
Just curious, though, do you actually have any evidence that Intellectual Ventures is charging people for stuff they were already doing? Have they taken anyone to court over these patents? I'm not buying their spin, I'm assuming their innocence until guilt is proven.