After leaving Microsoft, Myhrvold went into the patent business. His Intellectual Ventures works like this: Buy up patents, then use them to bludgeon large tech companies into forking over fees or making investments in Intellectual Ventures.

In the course of his short career, Zuckerberg, as a tipster reminded us, has accumulated a nice array of patents. They're related, as you might guess, to social networking and digital media. Could he use them against his rivals via Myhrvold, raising some money for Facebook in the process?

Given the interlocking web of interests a young Silicon Valley company like Facebook must weigh, the answer is likely to sound familiar to any user of the social network: It's complicated.

To date, he has raised $5 billion, but only brought in $1 billion. Myhrvold has gotten everyone from the Journal to BusinessWeek to the New Yorker to write about his big, scary patent operation.

Have any of those credulous journalists stopped to ask if Myhrvold might be a better publicist than a businessman? By Myhrvold's own admission, Intellectual Ventures is an operation which thrives by constantly extracting money from new investors. Perhaps Myhrvold should take out a patent on the Ponzi scheme.

The plan is for companies that buy into Allied Security to buy up unused patents, issue themselves nonexclusive licenses for a song and then sell the patents. While it's not clear if Allied Security is a nonprofit, former IBM veep Brian Hinman who heads up the organization asserts it's not a profit-making venture. IBM, of course, has done much to refashion itself as a promoter and producer of open-source software — something anathema to Microsoft's culture.

The same can't be said of Intellectual Ventures, which was founded by former Microsofties Nathan Myhrvold and Edward Jung, Intel's Peter Detkin, and Gregory Gorder of Seattle law firm Perkins Coie, which counts Microsoft as a top client. Myhrvold has been buying up patents left and right, and while his company has yet to sue anyone, he hasn't ruled it out. Microsoft executives have traditionally aped Bill Gates hard-line rhetoric when it comes to intellectual property, and there's little reason to believe Myhrvold and company are any different. While Google is also an investor in the fund (along with Apple and eBay), the Mountain View company must be worried enough about the fund's plans and ties to have helped create a potential competitor.

In other words, if Intellectual Ventures continued to aggregate patents in a competitive vacuum, it could become just as if not more dangerous a monopoly than Microsoft in the company's heyday by commanding premium royalties or denying access to patents entirely in order to hobble products and competitors. It's yet to be seen if Intellectual Ventures will carry water for the Redmond software giant in court, and for now, Allied Security is collection of legal documents and yet an actual owner of patents, but this could shape up to be one of the most boringly important battles in the coming years.