The patent troll that won a $308M jury trial against Apple

What do people turn to when the legal system fails them?

So you're a small startup with no sales trying to build a prototype, but you patented your idea so that you get a priority date, and also because a patent is the first thing investors want to see to know that your idea won't just be copied by anyone else. Now you just get run over by the big boys?

Now you're in the same situation, but you sell your patent to another entity because you can't afford yourself to sue the big boys for damage. You or anyone else you delegate should have no recourse at all?

Patents were made for a time before ubiquitous multinational corporations. If there are multiple sources of truth and markets for what is protected invention, then it greatly dilutes the power of that patent. This ends up hamstringing the countries most dependent on patenting to encourage innovation because we are still beholden to foreign interest who file their patents with the USPO or sell to an American troll. The US is the most fastidious in their preservation of patent law despite its many flaws and this is why we will lose out most in the global turning against protected invention.

Really? How about socializing all of medicine.

This is a very sensationalized, editorialized opinion-piece article. I would like to see something more objective, and substantive.

> So fast-forward a few years to 1981. Mr. Harvey sat down with an electrical engineer whose name was Jim Cuddihy. And together, Mr. Harvey and Mr. Cuddihy put together ground-breaking inventions in communications technology that were ahead of their time.

It sounds like they made something novel and interesting!

> PMC’s business “is to license out the technology of Mr. Harvey and Mr. Cuddihy so that companies that want to use that technology with permission can do so,” Subramanian explained. “The company has over 20 licensees, and they've earned millions and millions of dollars from companies who have paid for the right to use PMC's technology."

> To the extent that Harvey and Cuddihy ever had an idea for an actual product, it seems to have been a kind of computerized graphical overlay on top of a TV screen. At some point in the early 1990s, PMC demonstrated a prototype to some potential investors in New York City. The prototype system consisted of a VCR and a computer that were hooked up to another TV screen, which combined the video streams in some way. It wasn’t connected to the internet.

But they were given the patent for it right? And they clearly had some kind of a working prototype.

> Whatever this contraption was, it was likely pathetically out of date when it was shown off.

Oh so their "contraption" was pathetically out of date..

> PMC never made any for sale. And as the CEO admitted, they didn’t even spend on R&D. Instead, they embraced the fantasy language of the patent troll—one in which real companies, like Sony and Arris and other licensees, “took licenses in our inventions because they were using those inventions,” in the words of PMC’s general counsel, Thomas Scott.

REAL COMPANIES, like Sony and Arris and other licensees.

This is the crux of the issue right here. Basically, they developed the technology but were never able to productize it themselves. So they sold the tech to a bunch of other companies. And then later they discovered that the tech was being used by many more companies, in many more products.

This doesn't sound like a typical patent-troll case to me. Apple can afford to pay 300 mil for some tech that they didn't invent. God knows they've stolen way more than that.