The Spring of Wisdom (2)
Companies filed patents to protect their trademarks and technology, and if someone infringed on them, they enforced their rights through lawsuits.
But there were firms that didn’t actually run a business at all and specialized only in that kind of litigation.
They were called patent trolls.
They bought up patented technology from individuals or companies, then demanded enormous royalties from anyone who violated their intellectual property.
If the offer was refused, they filed suit at once.
They’d seek injunctions to block sales and shut down business operations, tying a company’s hands and feet; if the target couldn’t endure that pressure and raised the white flag, they extracted a settlement, and if the case went all the way to judgment, they wrung out damages instead.
There had even been plenty of cases where global giants like Enple and Guble ended up in their crosshairs.
After Cooloud listed on Nasdaq and achieved spectacular success, one of those patent trolls, Patrol, launched its attack.
While investigating Cooloud, they discovered that Rolf Buchi had founded the company by copying Jason Kim’s program, and then they acquired the rights to the program Jason had developed during his lifetime from his wife.
At the time, the amount they paid was said to be a mere fifty thousand dollars.
Patrol sued Cooloud for intellectual property infringement and filed for an injunction demanding that use of the program be stopped immediately.
In the end, Cooloud came to the negotiating table, and the two companies resolved the matter through a settlement.
The exact amount was never disclosed, but it was estimated to have been around two billion dollars.
Taking responsibility for that debacle, Alex Preston and Rolf Buchi stepped down, and Sid Lucas was appointed as the new CEO.
Even so, the two of them remained major shareholders, and Cooloud went on to prosper all the more, becoming a global powerhouse.
But this time, I had secured those rights myself.
What kind of result would that bring?
As I was mulling that over, David spoke.
“I was a little surprised by the settlement figure.”
He came out swinging right from the start.
“What would they have sold it for?”
“I think one hundred thousand dollars would have been more than enough.”
She clearly didn’t know how much value her husband’s program had really held. And considering she was raising twin sons on her own, every dollar must have mattered.
If I’d wanted to grind her down and buy it for a pittance, I could have done that without any trouble.
But I hadn’t. Was it because I was too kind?
Not a chance.
I’d rather not say it out loud, but I wasn’t that kind of guy. And my finances weren’t exactly overflowing, either.
And yet the reason I’d offered that amount was…
“Even if we secure the rights and file suit, it’ll take a long time before a ruling comes down, won’t it?”
“If it drags on, it could easily take more than five years.”
“Then until that point, we’d have to attack the other side’s morality. But if they stole it and we lowballed them in return, wouldn’t that just make us all the same kind of scum?”
But if I secured the rights by paying a proper price, then I could beat them over the head with the moral high ground.
There was another reason, too: Sid Lucas.
He had praised Minerva as a program developed by a genius. If I told him I’d bought it for a song, what would he think of me?
A patent troll could be cursed for squeezing someone for pennies; I didn’t care. I was different.
Patrol might have crushed them for fifty thousand dollars, and you could imagine Julia and her children struggling because of it, but the truth was different.
After Sid became CEO, he had paid Jason Kim’s family one million dollars every year on the anniversary of Jason’s death.
He had repeatedly spoken of his respect for Jason Kim, and when he visited Korea, the first thing he said was, “So this is Jason Kim’s country.”
“Shouldn’t genius accomplishments be paid for fairly?”
My words made David’s expression change.
“Was that too far-fetched?”
“Not at all. I was only thinking about the money, but you were looking at something bigger. Honestly, I’m a little shocked.”
“Not really.”
It was all thanks to knowing the future.
While we were talking, Julia came back with the laptop she had kept at home.
It looked as though it hadn’t been opened in ages, dust gathered over it, but once she plugged in the adapter, it thankfully powered on without a problem.
“There isn’t much stored on it.”
Just as she said, there wasn’t much on the machine itself. But that wasn’t a problem.
“In the twenty-first century, the important stuff is always in the cloud.”
At my words, Julia gave a small gasp.
“Ah!”
“What is it?”
She smiled faintly.
“Jason used to say the exact same thing.”
It wasn’t a workstation or anything fancy, so I couldn’t imagine how he’d done development work on a laptop like this. But with cloud computing, it was possible.
Just as you could remotely control a computer far away over the internet, you could run the heavy programs needed for development in the cloud, as long as you paid the usage fees.
After connecting to the internet and trying to access the cloud, I ran into a password prompt.
“Uh…”
I hadn’t thought of that.
But of course I should have. A developer wouldn’t have left the program open to just anyone.
If Patrol had sued Cooloud, that meant they had secured evidence they could prove in court. And that meant they must have found the password.
“Did Jason ever mention anything about a password?”
“He never really told me anything about that…”
“I see.”
After thinking for a moment, she suddenly looked as if she’d remembered something.
“Ah!”
“Did you remember?”
“He said only one person could handle Mimir.”
“I see.”
David said,
“I guess he meant himself.”
I tried typing in the password. I entered jasonkim, but it didn’t open.
“Wrong.”
Then something came to mind.
Jason Kim was his English name. His Korean name was Kim Jaehyun. So this time I typed kimjaehyun.
“Not this one either.”
The problem was…
David said with a hardened expression,
“It says there’s only one attempt left.”
“Uh…”
What happened if I got all three wrong? Would it be locked forever? Or would everything inside get erased?
Then I’d be screwed.
Damn it. What should I do?
I thought for a moment, then got to my feet.
“I’m going to consult an expert for a second.”
Once I was outside, I called Korea.
“Hey! Do you know what time it is?”
“Sorry. I guess it’s the middle of the night there.”
Truth was, I knew exactly what time it was. I called anyway.
Sunwoo’s voice was thick with sleep when he asked,
“You having fun in America?”
“I’m working.”
“It is going well, right? My money is safe, isn’t it?”
“No. I lost everything.”
“What!?”
“I’m kidding.”
Sunwoo barked at me.
“Don’t make that kind of joke!”
At least he sounded fully awake now.
“Let me ask you one thing.”
“What is it?”
“Do you know Mimir?”
“You mean from Norse mythology?”
“Yeah.”
“Of course I do. He’s a character that shows up in games all the time.”
He appeared so often in fantasy games and the like that anyone who played games at all would know the name.
“The situation right now is…”
I explained it to him roughly.
Sunwoo stayed silent for a while. Had he fallen asleep again?
“Are you asleep?”
“No.”
“Then why aren’t you saying anything?”
“Because it’s too easy.”
“Huh?”
“You know that Mimir guards the Well of Wisdom, right?”
“Yeah.”
“The story goes that if you drink from that spring, you gain wisdom, so Odin asked to be allowed to drink from it. Mimir said he could only drink if he gave up one eye, so Odin tore out one of his own eyes and drank the water.”
“I think I’ve heard that before.”
That was why Odin was always depicted as one-eyed in games and movies.
“There’s also a story that Mimir was later beheaded, and Odin kept his head alive and carried it around to ask it for advice.”
“So?”
“Then who else would be the one person able to handle Mimir?”
“Ah…”
It really was that simple.
I almost felt bad for waking him up to ask.
“Thanks. Go back to sleep.”
I rushed back inside and sat down in front of the laptop.
David said,
“You know this is the last try, right?”
“Be quiet.”
With trembling fingers, I pressed the letters one by one.
[odin]
The cloud opened.
We took the laptop back to the hotel where we were staying.
“Can you be certain this program is Minerva?”
“How would I know? Want to take a look?”
David glanced at it and said,
“I’m a lawyer.”
Both of us were humanities majors, so there was no way we’d know just by looking.
Fortunately, the cloud also held the mail and messenger archives. Inside were all the conversations Jason Kim had had with Rolf Buchi.
After reading through them, we were stunned.
“Isn’t this the kind of evidence that leaves no room for doubt?”
David’s eyes gleamed.
“This is really incredible. The man who was called a genius of Silicon Valley founded a company by stealing someone else’s program?”
“What happens if this gets out?”
“Rolf Buchi’s reputation will crash straight to the floor. He’ll have legal liability to answer for as well.”
“And Cooloud?”
“With the evidence this clear, we can first file for an injunction to stop them from using the program. Then, once a ruling comes down, we can claim damages and breach penalties for all the use up to now. Or we could negotiate and sell the rights to Cooloud, or receive shares equivalent to their value.”
I shook my head.
“That isn’t enough. I promised Julia I’d help her recover Mimir’s original name.”
“Don’t tell me…”
“Yes. I plan to use this to take over Cooloud in its entirety.”
David let out a long-suffering sigh.
“So when you said you wanted to acquire the company, you weren’t joking.”
“Mimir is Cooloud’s core program. If they can’t use it, they’d have to rebuild their whole system from scratch, and that’s impossible in any practical sense. If they don’t want to close up shop, why wouldn’t they sell?”
He raised a very practical issue.
“Do you even have the money for an acquisition?”
“Can’t we worry about that later?”
David’s face said, in no uncertain terms, what kind of nonsense that was. Trying to acquire a company without the money did sound absurd.
After thinking for a moment, he finally spoke.
“May I ask you something?”
“Ask anything you like.”
“Why are you in such a hurry?”
“Do I seem like I’m in a hurry?”
“If not, then what is it? You look like someone’s chasing you from behind. If you invest too aggressively, then even a small mistake can leave you with a massive blow.”
He was right.
I understood exactly why he was worried. That was how Victory Investment had collapsed, too.
“You know a thing or two about stock investing, right?”
“I know that October is supposed to be especially dangerous.”
I snorted.
“A Mark Twain quote.”
He also listed July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August, and February as dangerous months.
“Even when stock prices look as if they’re trending upward, the period when they actually rise is only about five percent of the time you hold them. Even if you’ve held a stock for years, if you miss that window, it’s meaningless.”