WASHINGTON — To its defenders, Intellectual Ventures is a revolutionary company unfairly viewed, in the words of its co-founder Peter N. Detkin, “as the poster child of everything that is wrong with the patent system.” To its critics, it is a protection racket otherwise known as a patent troll.

Edith Ramirez, the chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission, has urged a crackdown on the misuse of patents.

Ms. Ramirez has not named names, but to many listeners, her description sounds a lot like Intellectual Ventures, the largest in a growing number of companies — more charitably called “patent assertion entities” — that buy large portfolios of technology patents and use them to sue software designers, smartphone makers and the like.

Co-founded by Nathan Myhrvold, the former chief technology officer at Microsoft, a prolific inventor and the author of a $625 cookbook called “Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking,” Intellectual Ventures has vacuumed up 70,000 patents and related assets in the last 13 years. This year, the company has been busier than ever at the courthouse, filing 14 lawsuits so far — more than all the lawsuits it had previously filed since its founding in 2000. It also is expanding its fight beyond traditional technology companies. Eight of the 14 lawsuits are against banks, which Intellectual Ventures says infringed on patents that cover data encryption techniques, firewall protection systems or digital imaging.

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