The patent troll that won a $308M jury trial against Apple • Hacker News Board

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

#71

Post by monocasa » Sat, Apr 10, 2021, 4:12 AM UTC

TomVDB wrote: post #60

monocasa wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our current system uses incredible amounts of public funding for drug discovery. https://www.pnas.org/content/115/10/2329

The article references mentions $100B over a period of 7 years, or $14B per year. That’s a decent chunk of money, but it’s important to put it in perspective. Pfizer alone spends around $10B per year on R&D. J&J: $12B. Merck: $13B.

And how much of the expenditure goes anywhere useful? And remember that they're incentivized to report 15% of their revenue being spent on R&D for tax reasons.

That $100B is just for drugs that later got FDA approval, not the NIH grant budget.

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

#72

Post by harles » Sat, Apr 10, 2021, 4:13 AM UTC

mxcrossb wrote: post #45

freedomben wrote: post #9

Every so often a patent troll story comes up on HN, and people like me bitch about how broken the system is and get group therapy from shouting into the wind on a web forum. What can we actually do . How do we start fixing this problem?

Apple apparently has 308 million dollars of incentives to fix the system, so maybe that’s a good start.

But they also won $500m+ from Samsung using the same system. Not to mention the defensive position it gives them. It seems like an overwhelmingly net positive for Apple.

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

#73

Post by aptwebapps » Sat, Apr 10, 2021, 4:15 AM UTC

sverhagen wrote: post #59

At the risk of losing some karma here... and prefacing this with: I hate these patent trolls, they go entirely against my senses... I am wondering: is there a charitable view on the "other side" of this that I'm not seeing, in which these people have some (perhaps weird) way of morally justifying this practice?

The problem isn't really NPEs. If it makes sense to have patents, then it probably makes sense to have a market in patents. The problem is mostly low-quality patents and the fact that the patent system is a poor fit for software.

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

#74

Post by monocasa » Sat, Apr 10, 2021, 4:17 AM UTC

JamesBarney wrote: post #52

pacifist wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? How about socializing all of medicine.

The patent's purpose is to incentivize innovation. Some industries need this (medical) others don't (software). So if you got rid of patents innovation in some industries will be fine (software) and others will be wrecked (medical). Patents are not the only way to incentivize innovation, and I think it'd be great to experiment with some other ways. Socializing medicine is completely orthogonal to this issue. Unless y…

It's funny, I've heard from biomed engineers that it's clear to them that patents don't work in the medical field, unlike how they're effective in the software field.

It feels like every field knows that they're a cash grab without a lot of benefits, but assumes there's some industry that they don't work in where they're needed.

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

#75

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Apr 10, 2021, 4:17 AM UTC

ekianjo wrote: post #55

JamesBarney wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You still need patents. Healthcare is an obvious example, if we eliminated patents we'd have 0 new drugs pass FDA approval over the next decade. But software is very different from medical patents.

Funny. New drugs existed before patents were a thing.

[deleted]

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

#76

Post by rasz » Sat, Apr 10, 2021, 4:18 AM UTC

Apple is very reluctant to put all of their heart in patent battles, to the point you start wondering if maybe internal patent attorneys are calling the shots and like the status quo a little too much.

They pretty much intentionally lost S3TC patent case opting not to push for patent invalidation https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/itc-judge-rules-tha... The thing about s3tc is _its Apple own technology_, just renamed and repurposed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S3_Texture_Compression "This mode operates similarly to mode 0xC0 of the original Apple Video codec." is an understatement. S3 directly lifted Apple patented QuickTime Road Pizza technique of encoding 4 colors using 2 values (same math, same values, same purpose, no prior art acknowledgment), to ~10 years later sue and win.

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

#77

Post by mr_toad » Sat, Apr 10, 2021, 4:26 AM UTC

tombert wrote: post #13

freedomben wrote: post #9

Every so often a patent troll story comes up on HN, and people like me bitch about how broken the system is and get group therapy from shouting into the wind on a web forum. What can we actually do . How do we start fixing this problem?

I've wondered that too. How can we realistically boycott the companies that abuse patents? I suppose I could stop using Apple products, but most current software jobs require some form of smartphone for authentication, so I need an iPhone or Android phone, thus supporting Google or Samsung or LG or one of the other big megacorps that abuse the American patent system. I feel like the only thing that could conceivably…

> How can we realistically boycott the companies that abuse patents?

You mean law firms?

Most patent trolls don’t make or sell anything. There’s nothing to boycott.

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

#78

Post by hi_im_miles » Sat, Apr 10, 2021, 4:27 AM UTC

JamesBarney wrote: post #52

pacifist wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? How about socializing all of medicine.

The patent's purpose is to incentivize innovation. Some industries need this (medical) others don't (software). So if you got rid of patents innovation in some industries will be fine (software) and others will be wrecked (medical). Patents are not the only way to incentivize innovation, and I think it'd be great to experiment with some other ways. Socializing medicine is completely orthogonal to this issue. Unless y…

The problem is that there is no way to experiment with other ways of funding health care research, as the cost of doing so is set at highly entrenched monopoly prices. There is no reason for those with capital to consider alternatives when there is already so much money to be made in the existing system.

I too believe that medical innovation would be wrecked by the elimination of patents, but I think that is less to due some inevitable aspect of human nature, and more due to existing incentive structures that have been created by means of policy.

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

#79

Post by TomVDB » Sat, Apr 10, 2021, 4:30 AM UTC

monocasa wrote: post #71

TomVDB wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article references mentions $100B over a period of 7 years, or $14B per year. That’s a decent chunk of money, but it’s important to put it in perspective. Pfizer alone spends around $10B per year on R&D. J&J: $12B. Merck: $13B.

And how much of the expenditure goes anywhere useful? And remember that they're incentivized to report 15% of their revenue being spent on R&D for tax reasons. That $100B is just for drugs that later got FDA approval, not the NIH grant budget.

If you’re going to make that argument, you also have to consider the opposite possibility: I’ve worked on (non-medical) projects with public funding in the past. One can only hope that my experience wasn’t representative for the amount waste of public money in the medical world.

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

#80

Post by kenneth » Sat, Apr 10, 2021, 4:32 AM UTC

alisonkisk wrote: post #69

defaultname wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're absolutely right, however let's note that no rational person would conclude that Apple actually infringed on any invention of this patent troll. This case should have gone nowhere, and the plaintiffs should have been sent home with a bill for the defense's legal counsel. I mentioned in another comment about the Eastern District of Texas which became effectively a giant grift operation (though a recent SC case…

It's ironic to use the xenophobic slur "banana republic" to describe a US Federal Court in Texas.

No idea when banana republic became a "xenophobic slur." It's a pretty well understood term describing a country (or sub-jurisdiction in this example) that is so dependent on a foreign-controlled company or industry that it can be bossed around by that industry.

Pretty ridiculous how the most benign of terms all become slurs in the woke era.