New venture fund aims at growing larger pie instead of extracting as much as possible from pie for itself

[s]uggesting that some venture capital colleagues have gotten greedy at the expense of entrepreneurs, the four Internet tycoons behind the Founders Fund on Tuesday touted the creation of a new $220 million investment fund as well as a stock plan designed to reduce tension between entrepreneurs and VCs.  […]  ‘There have been all kinds of situations with very, very complicated deal structures, where (venture capitalists) are trying to extract as much as possible from a pie, as opposed to growing a larger pie,’ said Peter Thiel, former chairman and chief executive at Paypal and a director at Facebook. The goal, he said, is to create ‘less of a zero-sum game.’”

The Register points out that “[a]s the tenth anniversary of Sun Microsystems’ StarOffice acquisition approaches it grows increasingly difficult to fathom what Sun intends for its suite.  […]  While Sun clearly has a future planned for StarOffice it is hard to know why, given that it admits that it is quite happy for everyone to download OpenOffice for free.”

The Los Angeles Times reports that “[o]nline file-sharing service TorrentSpy.com is liable for extensive movie piracy because it destroyed evidence in a copyright case, a federal judge has ruled, handing a victory to Viacom Inc.’s Paramount Pictures and other studios.  The defendants ‘engaged in widespread and systematic efforts to destroy evidence and have provided false testimony under oath in an effort to hide evidence of such destruction,’ Cooper said in the Dec. 13 order, adding that sanctions were appropriate in this case because of "extraordinary circumstances.”

CNetNews.com has an interesting article today on widgets being the “new ad kid on the block.”

ZDNet writes that “Microsoft has landed Viacom as an exclusive advertising partner. With the deal, announced Wednesday, Microsoft gets another customer for its Atlas ad platform and splits revenue on remnant inventory.  The deal is wide ranging, but he most notable part of the deal is that Microsoft’s Atlas platform becomes the exclusive ad serving tool for Viacom’s brands ranging from MTV to Comedy Central to Nickelodeon. Microsoft has been on an advertising tear of late. Viacom joins Facebook, Digg and CNBC as large Microsoft ad partners. And given Viacom’s history with Google it was pretty clear that Sumner wasn’t going to call Larry and Sergey.”