alt Hacker NewsI certainly did not expect the plot twist!
Id love to understand how a french government sovereign investment fund ends up involved in this.
Was the the patent troll (or really, its lawyers) vendor explicitly shopped because of a reputation for playing dirty ?
or if is a case of really, really bad incentives, where the idea was legit...but a rogue actor just took it in an unexpected direction ?
I hope the investigation can go upstream and get this information
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I imagine the explanation is a lot simpler and boring.
The french fund got some assets that they didn't know what to do with, so they just loaned it out to the highest bidder.
Just capitalism being capitalism. But that is how investment funds work - they don't usually directly manage things but give it to other people to manage.
They don't make pink slime by grinding up ribeyes.
My initial assumption is that they acquire some IP in bulk, monetized what they could in better ways and then were left with a couple D rate pieces that they happily loaned out to anyone willing to make a buck with them on the condition they get a cut. It just so happened that "anyone" was a less than upstanding party.