The Avanci patent licensing group, originally founded by Ericsson, has announced that Orange has joined the pool, bringing the membership count to 31. While the remit for Avanci was to make licensing of IoT technologies easier and less prone to litigation, a couple of years of malicious litigation have darkened the mood in the industry. When Avanci finally starts to swing the hammer, it could to be very poorly received. Collectively, the 31 companies are contributing their intellectual property to a pool, and then working out how much each piece of IP is worth to any given technology. Then, Avanci can pursue other companies for payments, distributing these earnings to the members according to that internal valuation breakdown. Given that…