Season 4 of the US TV show Silicon Valley aired earlier this year. For those that aren’t familiar with Silicon Valley, IPcopy notes that it is a comedy show that follows six people who have founded a startup company, Pied Piper, relating to an innovative data compression algorithm developed by one of the founders of the company.

The situations that the members of Pied Piper find themselves in feel, for the most part, plausibly accurate perhaps because one of the co-creators of the show, Mike Judge (of Beavis and Butthead and King of the Hill fame) worked in a silicon valley startup earlier in his career.

Since the show’s fictional startup is working in the Silicon Valley environment you might expect intellectual property issues to crop up now and then and this was indeed the case in the most recent season with a couple of episodes dealing with a patent relating to a decentralised, peer to peer network.

So, how did it do? Did it get its IP references correct or did it make an unholy mess like Suits? (more…)