Intellectual Ventures on This American Life
This is all basically a "stupid tax". We Americans are too stupid to engineer a reasonable patent system, and the price we pay is cramped innovation and increased costs. The Myhrvold guy is a parasite, and so are the source of his $5 billion capital and the ridiculous state of patent law that enables his behavior. The patents being cranked out by the PTO look like they were written by a group of 5 year olds with a Markov text generator.Also this was a great piece of journalism.