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

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

#131

Post by gambiting »

linspace wrote: post #116

As an european I find the american legal system baffling. I do wonder if the sentiment is reciprocal. In particular everytime I see a movie about lawyers I think that something must be broken if there is a subgenre about "how the system works in the end". That and incarceration rate. Trials suck everywhere, even if you win, but it seems it's much easier to end having one in USA.

It's the jury system that seems to be one of the craziest things about the US system. Luckily other countries don't have it, or only have it for the most serious of crimes(murder trials). Like....who ever thought that having 12 random people decide if you're guilty or not is a good idea?

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

#132

Post by hurril »

cycomanic wrote: post #123

The issue I have with much of the patent trolling bashing is, that it somehow makes a distinction between practicing companies who make something and non practicing entities. I think this is a huge veil the industry pulled over people's eyes. Why is it OK for huge companies like apple, IBM, Google... to use the patent system to keep out any competitors or newcomers, but it is not ok for smaller inventors to sell thei…

This is a false dichotomy if I ever saw one. The fight is not between the ones that legitimately use patents and those that've merely bought (or created) them to make money off of the IP itself.

There are, in fact, four alternatives here and not two:

1. Producing company, legitimate patents; 2. Producing company, illegitimate patents; 3. Non-producing company, legitimate patents; 4. Non-producing company, illegitimate patents.

What I think grinds most people's gears are #4 suing #1 (or #3, though I don't think _this_ is common.)

So your attempt at making this out to be a (false) choice between #1+2 on the one hand and #3+4 on the other is disingenuous.

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

#133

Post by ksec »

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?

I mean, sort of like it depends.

Some of these NPE bought those patents from previous PE that actually put the work on some of those innovation. That could be from Video Codec, 3G/4G Telecom Spec, Wireless Spec etc. I think those tends to have some merit. They never stayed around long enough to have a return of investment on their R&D. So patent is part of those asset, they should be of some value.

Whether you agree the price for those patents is entirely different. Although you could also argue those are bogus patent with no value.

It is also worth mentioning companies tend to file and fill as much patents as possible to some sort of spec in order to gain at least some form of ROI. The reason being the thing / part they work on for years may never had made it to the spec, but in the process of competing they might have made the official spec better. So despite their tools not ending up within the spec they might still want to get as much from the patent pool as part of their work.

Again, whether they are asking for too much of it is somewhat a different question. If you spend enough time on HN in the past few years most people would think 4G and 5G patents are absurd and Qualcomm is evil. I tend to hold a contrarian view they are not. ( At least not as evil as most would think )

What I cant stand is things like "Single Button Purchase" Patent from Amazon. I give some benefit of doubt to pull to refresh from Twitter. But single button purchase is .... I dont have a word to explain it. Although there may be people who disagree with me and think a single button purchase is genius.

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

#134

Post by hi_im_miles »

anticensor wrote: post #111
breck wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly this. I worked for a few years in big tech, and it was crystal clear that patents and copyrights were awful in tech. But I believed the lie that maybe in medicine, they were needed. I spent a few years in medical research and realized that ohhhh shit, even worse in this industry. The whole thing is a big lie. End copyrights. End patents. The ideal length is zero. There is no case to be made to support them. W…

Not zero, but 3½ years for patents and 21 years (7+3½ per extension) for copyright is enough.

But why have them at all, especially if we’re going to shoot for arbitrary amounts of time?

I don’t buy that IP protections incentivize innovation anymore than they prevent it. The reality is that the gains from intellectual property are not distributed evenly, and corporate executives know this. If IP is making you millions of dollars, that is a very different situation from IP just “making you a living.”

Even if you are doing well as a small IP-based business, you’re still stuck paying a premium on everything you buy (thanks to the existence of IP monopolies), and you still have little recourse against IP violations from large corporations and anonymous pirates.

I just don’t get how this isn’t all an enormous waste of resources for anyone but the already rich, or a completely raw deal for people who mod games, remix music, repair electronics, etc etc.

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

#135

Post by hutzlibu »

gambiting wrote: post #131
linspace wrote: post #116

As an european I find the american legal system baffling. I do wonder if the sentiment is reciprocal. In particular everytime I see a movie about lawyers I think that something must be broken if there is a subgenre about "how the system works in the end". That and incarceration rate. Trials suck everywhere, even if you win, but it seems it's much easier to end having one in USA.

It's the jury system that seems to be one of the craziest things about the US system. Luckily other countries don't have it, or only have it for the most serious of crimes(murder trials). Like....who ever thought that having 12 random people decide if you're guilty or not is a good idea?

"Like....who ever thought that having 12 random people decide if you're guilty or not is a good idea?"

Probably people, who experienced their share of professional, but corrupt judges, who live worlds apart from the common people they judge over.

If a verdict is supposed to represent the peoples will - doesn't it make sense to involve actual common people?

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

#136

Post by vasco »

cycomanic wrote: post #123

The issue I have with much of the patent trolling bashing is, that it somehow makes a distinction between practicing companies who make something and non practicing entities. I think this is a huge veil the industry pulled over people's eyes. Why is it OK for huge companies like apple, IBM, Google... to use the patent system to keep out any competitors or newcomers, but it is not ok for smaller inventors to sell thei…

Patents are a monopoly on an idea. And ideas shouldn't be owned by anyone. One shouldn't be forced to share their ideas, but the concept of coming up with something, and then going to your community and saying:

"Hey everyone, I thought of this and wrote it down, none of you wrote it down before so now it's my idea for the next 30 years"

Is just ridiculous.

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

#137

Post by fsflover »

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?

Support Electronic Frontier Foundation: https://www.eff.org/issues/patents.

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

#138

Post by lostdog »

RobertRoberts wrote: post #64
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?

I finally heard a good argument in support of "patent trolls" from a friend who has a few patents. It was something like this: "The little guys can't fight legal battles with large corporations. So either you work with lawyers that are labeled patent trolls or you lose your patent by default by lack of defending it. Or you can go broke fighting in court." It was the first time I had considered the possibility that th…

How is this argument remotely good?

These lawyers, and more importantly, these shell companies, are being labeled as patent trolls because they're filing nonsense patents and then spraying nonsense lawsuits around to try to capture random prey. They're not the vanguard of "protecting the little guy."

The idea that making it easy for bad patents to be defended is somehow good is ridiculous. It ignores the possibility that the patent office, the legislature, and the courts need to improve so that good patents are protected but bad patents aren't a drain on society.

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

#139

Post by lelanthran »

cycomanic wrote: post #123

The issue I have with much of the patent trolling bashing is, that it somehow makes a distinction between practicing companies who make something and non practicing entities. I think this is a huge veil the industry pulled over people's eyes. Why is it OK for huge companies like apple, IBM, Google... to use the patent system to keep out any competitors or newcomers, but it is not ok for smaller inventors to sell thei…

> In fact bogus patents help established companies even more, because the trolls at least have to defend those patents in court at times, a small new player who is threatened by a large established one over some bogus patent can't afford to defend themselves.

At one point when Microsoft was still in the phone business, I recall an article pointing out that Microsoft made more money off android in a single year (unspecified patents in a patent deal with google[1]) than they made out of their own mobile OS in its entire lifespan.

[1] My memory may be inaccurate, but I seem to recall that they did the patent shakedown without ever specifying exactly which patents android were infringing. There was a lot of speculation that it was the FAT patents, butu I don't recall ever seeing it being disclosed.

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

#140

Post by OJFord »

vasco wrote: post #136
cycomanic wrote: post #123

The issue I have with much of the patent trolling bashing is, that it somehow makes a distinction between practicing companies who make something and non practicing entities. I think this is a huge veil the industry pulled over people's eyes. Why is it OK for huge companies like apple, IBM, Google... to use the patent system to keep out any competitors or newcomers, but it is not ok for smaller inventors to sell thei…

Patents are a monopoly on an idea. And ideas shouldn't be owned by anyone. One shouldn't be forced to share their ideas, but the concept of coming up with something, and then going to your community and saying: "Hey everyone, I thought of this and wrote it down, none of you wrote it down before so now it's my idea for the next 30 years" Is just ridiculous.

But "so now it's my idea" just means "now only I can produce this thing commercially, unless I give you permission".

The alternative is "only I can produce this thing commercially, and you have no idea how I made it anyway".

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