Apple to Close Stores in Eastern District of Texas to Fight Patent Trolls

Summary judgement is cheap (well, relative to litigation, that is), fast and occurs early in the development of the lawsuit before the most expensive steps take place.

It is a direct competitor to just paying the trolls their settlement amount to stop bothering you.

US rules on patents are created by a combination of laws and precedents. Of the two, precedent is in practice more important because courts are bound to interpret new cases in accord with how higher courts have interpreted old ones, no matter what they think of the interpretation.

And now consider the structure of US courts. An insane fraction of patent lawsuits start in Texas. Thanks to a special legal arrangement, all patent cases from anywhere next go to a special court known as the Federal Circuit. And only after that to the Supreme Court.

It is a general rule of bureaucracy that people will consistently interpret their jobs in a way that makes their role more important. All patent cases go to the Federal Circuit. The more powerful patents are, the more important that court is. Would you guess that their precedents are generally going to increase or decrease the importance of patents?

Now the Supreme Court does overturn them occasionally. But the Supreme Court is busy and only does this so often. And when the Supreme Court overturns them, the next case relying on Supreme Court precedent inevitably goes to the Federal Circuit, which has proven very willing to engage in sophistry to issue a new binding precedent that clearly is the opposite of what the Supreme Court meant. And since there is no easy way to remove those judges, there is no consequence for them in doing so. Around the country lawyers who specialize in patents, whose livelihood also depends on patents being important, cynically applaud. And the escalator continues.

Now here is the truth. US law already says that abstract ideas (like math) are not patentable. The decision that software is more like machines than math doesn't come from Congress, it comes from the courts. Congress could pass more laws. But they would get interpreted by the same court. Would you care to wager on how that will work out?

The real solution is to recognize that creating the Federal Circuit in 1980 was a bad idea and reverse it. However remember what I said at the beginning about big pharma liking patents? Exactly...

Why would Apple shoulder the burden of the lobbying effort when all of the other tech companies would be happy to ride their coat-tails?

Additionally, the political climate re IP lobbying in the past 5 years has been non-optimal to push for changes. Apple has been involved in several very large IP disputes, which makes their involvement look self serving, the AIA was relatively new and some people wanted to wait to see if it would be effective, a new USPTO director came in only a year ago* (prior to which the previous director was very unlikely to make large changes at the end of their mandate), and the current administration is very hostile towards coastal IP-centric business.

*Oh, and he's fucking horrible: https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2018/10/19/iancu-risk-takers-pate...

"Residency" in this sense is evidently not the same as "having an established place of business". Apple is avoiding having an "established place of business" in the eastern district.