Investor Upset That Transmeta Isn't Solely Focused On Suing Companies For Patent Infringement
Date : 02 07 2008 Category : Business
Techdirt
Back in 2006, we noted that hyped-up Transmeta, the semiconductor startup that Linus Torvalds worked at for a while, had pretty much failed in the marketplace and was making a last ditch effort to sue companies for patent infringement. It was a pattern we had seen over and over again: a company that can't actually compete in the marketplace responds to its own misfortune by trying to drag down the company that did succeed, using patent infringement claims as the anchor. However, it appears that an investor in Transmeta is now upset that the company didn't take this "sue everyone who did a better job than us" strategy far enough. Specifically, Transmeta settled with Intel a few months after filing a patent infringement lawsuit, and the investor is upset that the company didn't fight it out for a higher return. So, now, he's hoping to buy out the rest of the firm, shut down the parts that are actually doing something and producing value, and instead just turn the whole company into a patent lawsuit machine. Just as Thomas Jefferson originally envisioned.
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