You may or may not remember the "Rembrandts in the Attic" thesis of business gurus Kevin G. Rivette and David Kline. Their idea, from the extremely popular 1999 book of the same name, was that companies' untapped intellectual property was as valuable as if they had paintings by the Dutch master sitting neglected in their attics.

Rivette and Kline sent corporations around the world scurrying into the rafters of their intellectual-property portfolios to see what assets they might be able to cash in on. But it turns out the action is playing more like Night of the Living Dead, the classic 1968 horror film in which the "unburied dead" come back to attack the living with a vengeance.