Taxpayers as Venture Capitalists
Lawrence Ebert - patent lawyer, smart guy, self promoter - concludes that taxpayers are not venture capitalists.
Here's an excerpt from his IPBiz blog:
IPBiz notes that Iverson's remark is dead-on: taxpayers are not venture capitalists.
IPBiz notes additionally that California taxpayers were misled by Proposition 71 proponents into thinking that there would be financial benefits to the state of California from patent royalties. The study by Baker at Stanford just cooked up numbers, with no basis in reality (and which, in a major accounting error, did not discount "future" money to "present" value). The whole advocacy by Prop. 71 backers was bogus, and the approval by voters was the result of false pretenses.