Most startups fail to survive long term, and the reasons for those failures are as varied as the companies and their products, goals and mission statements. Typically it comes down to money, in the way everything is about money in some form: not having enough money, not being able to convince investors to give them more money, not having enough customers willing to part with their money for what the company is selling. It’s unfortunate, but it’s a hard reality that many of the startups you read about or see will at some point blink out of existence, left as little more than a memory to stumble upon later. 

But what if a failed company lived or, or at least its intellectual property? That’s the question posed by a recent spate of lawsuits brought against Apple and Google by Jawbone Innovations LLC alleging patent infringement on the part of the tech giants. The patents themselves originated with Jawbone, the once-prominent manufacturer of wireless technology that started out selling Bluetooth headsets and wireless speakers before pivoting to wearable health monitors before eventually reaching the terminus of the venture altogether. As you might imagine, even a business that is ultimately unsuccessful still has intellectual property that has some value to someone, and it seems that Jawbone’s patents related to noise-isolation algorithms are valuable enough to try and take both Apple and Google to court over.  

It doesn’t seem to be the case that Jawbone has lain dormant for close to four years waiting for the opportunity to launch a lawsuit against those companies. James Vincent of The Verge concisely notes that the reporting this far indicates Jawbone Innovations LLC has no apparent relation to the now-defunct business, but is instead an entity that holds at least some of the patents once held by Jawbone, and perhaps nothing else — the dreaded patent troll. 

All the evidence compiled by Vincent makes a strong case to label the entity as a troll: the fact that the listed manager has priors in what would be considered patent trolling, the fact that the suit is filed in the Western District of Texas, long considered a favored venue for patent trolls, and the fact that the suit is aimed at both Apple and Google, because if you’re going to take a shot, it may as well be a big shot.  Given all that, there’s a non-zero chance that Jawbone Innovations LLC is able to walk away with something from all this, which is the point of the entire exercise of patent trolling: playing the numbers that eventually you’ll hit a payday. Still, it’s a bit sad to think that the innovations of a once-promising company are now being used for something so base as a desperate grab for a quick and easy buck.

With a few possible exceptions, it’s hard to imagine that most of the creators of wildly popular innovations know that their ideas are going to be a hit when they first put them out into the world. (The inventor of the wheel, on the other hand, probably knew they landed on a winner pretty quickly.) As such, our recent history is littered with stories of creators signing away the rights to their work for little more than a pittance, only to see that creation go on to be worth millions of dollars in the hands of someone else. 

Nowhere is that more true than in the earliest days of comic books, where writers churned out characters and stories to be sold to kids for pocket change, only to have many of those characters and stories become the dominant form of entertainment in the twenty-first century. Given that lapse in time, most of those creators didn’t live to see that day, or rather to lament the lost fortune they missed out on. But those creators have heirs, and those heirs are now poised to fight for ownership of their work with the studio built upon the IP they created. 

The Hollywood Reporter has the story of how Marvel has filed complaints against the estates of late comic book luminaries like Steve Ditko, Stan Lee and Larry Lieber and others, seeking to forestall the copyright terminations filed by their representatives seeking to reclaim at least partial ownership. At stake, of course, is the tens of millions of dollars that Marvel would likely have to split with those estates were they to gain some rights over the characters created by writers in the 1960s and1970s.  

Where the matter gets complicated for the estates, and where Marvel’s complaints might find purchase in the courts, is the manner in which comic book artists have operated for much of the existence of the medium. Because these writers didn’t have much leverage or power or have any way of knowing what their creations would become, almost all were subject to work-for-hire arrangements with publishers, without ownership of what they came up with. Marvel’s writers and artists also famously worked under the ‘Marvel Method’, which was more collaborative than a single writer toiling away at a story in a solitary office. 

It’s these two points that Marvel will hold up as evidence that the respective writers in question can’t be definitively determined as the author under law, and if history is any indication, they stand a decent chance at winning. The estates of Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster were unsuccessful in reclaiming ownership of the Man of Steel, and the heirs to Jack Kirby, the man responsible for the titular characters in Marvel’s next blockbuster Eternals, as well as a score of other iconic creations, fell similarly short in their bid to get back any rights to his work. And while those names and the names of other seminal figures of iconic creators are duly recognized by fans for their contributions, it’s a shame that their families aren’t able to reap the financial benefits as the foundation of the biggest movie (and TV) franchise currently going.