Intellectual Ventures boasts of having more than 30,000 patents—but you'd have to look for a long time to find one that can hold up under real scrutiny.

After staying quiescent for years, IV opened up a barrage of lawsuits to enforce its patents in 2010. But the companies that decided to stand up to IV rather than buckle under have been faring well, as judges have found the patents that IV has chosen to enforce in court less than impressive. It's a telling sign about the giant patent-holder's collection. Given the opportunity to pull just about any patent out of its huge collection, one would assume the company would choose the best of the lot. But much of it appears to be exactly the kind of easy handouts from the dot-com boom era that have been called out by critics of "patent trolls."

Earlier this week, Intellectual Ventures lost two more major patent cases at the nation's top patent court. It lost a case against Erie Indemnity Company and several other insurers, which had stood accused of infringing US Patent Nos. 6,510,434, 6,519,581, and 6,546,002. The same judges also tossed patents asserted against banking company Capital One. All were found invalid under the Supreme Court's Alice Corp. precedent, which barred many patents that describe basic business processes and add computer jargon.

Further Reading Patent troll Intellectual Ventures faces off against Moto

The '434 patent describes a way of using an index of XML tags to search through a computer database. "The patent explains that a prior art database search for records containing the term 'Ford,' for example, may return hits related to the Ford Company, Ford Theatre, and the Ford brand of trucks," writes Chief Judge Sharon Prost in a unanimous opinion (PDF) . "Thus, a searcher interested only in information related to Ford trucks would need to sift through a potentially large number of false hits to locate the desired information."

This patent, essentially describing a kind of fancy computerized index, was originally filed in 1999 by two Atlanta-based researchers for the BellSouth phone company. Its problems would be obvious to a schoolchild—namely, that indexes have existed for centuries. "A hardcopy based classification system (such as library-indexing system) employs a similar concept as the one recited by the ’434 patent," notes Prost. The appeals judges agreed with the lower court judge and threw out the patent.

Last and perhaps least comes Intellectual Ventures' ’002 patent, which discloses a "mobile interface" for retrieving remote files. Once more, IV lawyers used fancy-sounding computer language to try to dress up an utterly droll idea, arguing that "the claimed mobile interface is a particular software-driven machine that performs specific operations to solve a problem unique to the field of computer networks," writes Prost. But the claimed invention "merely recites retrieving the information through the mobile interface" using generic computer language. The '002 patent was thrown out as well.

The appeals judges didn't consider the technology behind the '581 patent, since the court ruled that IV didn't have standing to bring suit under that patent at all due to problems with IV's patent transfer process.

Crown jewels?

More than any other patent-holding company, Intellectual Ventures has set up a giant public relations operation including a showy laboratory in Bellevue. It has billed itself for years as a "marketplace for invention." Yet, the patents it has chosen to actually enforce in court have turned out to be less than impressive.

In addition to the Erie Indemnity case, the same panel of appeals judges gave credit card company Capital One, a longtime IV opponent, a clean sweep victory (PDF) on Tuesday. It's actually the second case in which Capital One has bested IV lawyers, who have claimed that the Seattle patent-holder they represent owns a preposterous range of basic banking innovations.

IV accused Capital One of infringing patents numbered 7,984,081, 6,715,084, and 6,546,002, with the '002 patent being the same one asserted against Erie. The appeals judges take each one in turn. The '084 patent was one that another judge had ruled on, so the appeals court agreed with the district court judge that IV shouldn't be allowed to litigate it again in another district. The '002 patent was thrown out for the reasons described above in the Erie case. As to the '081, the court agreed that they described abstract concepts and shouldn't have been considered patentable in the first place.

The '081 patent describes a way of editing XML documents that use different formats. "Stripped of excess verbiage, the claim creates the dynamic document based upon 'management record types' (“MRTs”) and 'primary record types' (“PRTs”)," both terms of art coined by the inventor, writes Prost. She held that "the patent claims are, at their core, directed to the abstract idea of collecting, displaying, and manipulating data." The references to XML and invented terms like MRTs "do not make an abstract concept any less abstract."

An earlier case against Capital One fell apart after a judge threw out a patent he called "nothing more than the mere manipulation or reorganization of data." Another patent in that case was designed by a patent lawyer's wife; the couple said they had invented banking "security alerts" and worked with IV to demand a royalty from Capital One. Other IV patents, all ultimately tossed out or dropped from the case, were claimed to cover CVV codes on credit cards and no-envelope ATMs.

An IV spokesperson declined to comment on the company's recent court losses. Capital One and Erie Indemnity didn't respond to requests for comment.