Chaotic Neutral.
The patent troll that won a $308M jury trial against Apple
181–190 of 281 posts
Re: The patent troll that won a $308M jury trial against Apple
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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?
>>If a verdict is supposed to represent the peoples will - doesn't it make sense to involve actual common people? No, because the law should be followed to the letter and "common people" are not qualified to pass judgement. Jury trials in the US just seem to be about how 12 people feel about someone, not whether law was actually broken or not. Every time I hear a case where there was no hard evidence against somebody…
This is true, but on the other hand the laws have gotten so outworldly complicated, that bringing in common people is a counterbalance to this.
And I think patent laws and law fights about them, are a circus already without naive common people.
And talking about circus
Far from perfect and
Re: The patent troll that won a $308M jury trial against Apple
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Ideas can explicitly not be patented. "A patent cannot be obtained upon a mere idea or suggestion. The patent is granted upon the new machine, manufacture, etc., as has been said, and not upon the idea or suggestion of the new machine. A complete description of the actual machine or other subject matter for which a patent is sought is required." https://www.uspto.gov/patents/basics
I'm on a few dumb software patents and they always start with "a server configured to..." given how close software patents are to ideas.
Re: The patent troll that won a $308M jury trial against Apple
#184I don't see how this one district in eastern Texas can be such an outlier without some sort of oversight. Does no one find it absurd that all these patent cases go here, that the results are so consistently in the favour of the plaintiff, etc?
Re: The patent troll that won a $308M jury trial against Apple
#185Earlier 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.
That's not what xenophobic means.
Re: The patent troll that won a $308M jury trial against Apple
#186The patent system, at least in the US, is broken and supports many actions, like patent trolling, that only benefit such vermin. Rather than trying to make life harder for such trolls we should focus on fixing the patent system. My 2c.
There's no reason not to do both.
Fixing the system is hard while harassing a troll is a lot easier. This might lead to avoiding fixing the system altogether -- once people realize how hard it us, both technically and politically, they might stop at beating the troll solution as "good enough for now".
Re: The patent troll that won a $308M jury trial against Apple
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Ideas can explicitly not be patented. "A patent cannot be obtained upon a mere idea or suggestion. The patent is granted upon the new machine, manufacture, etc., as has been said, and not upon the idea or suggestion of the new machine. A complete description of the actual machine or other subject matter for which a patent is sought is required." https://www.uspto.gov/patents/basics
He means idea in the broader sense of nonphysical concept. For example, the patent for a drug is not private property in the same way that a plot of land is. One is a physical entity which can only be owned/utilised by one person or group at a time, and another has no physical properties and can be utilised by literally every single person alive had they the inclination.
Patents/IP/etc only have 'scarcity' because the government agrees to grant a monopoly to a person or corporation. It doesn't have any basis in natural law.
Re: The patent troll that won a $308M jury trial against Apple
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
People like to say that without patents there will be no incentive to advance technology, but if you're the one to come up with an idea then you already have a huge head start. If you don't make use of that head start, then you don't deserve it, and this applies to patents as well. Monopolies are bad, and competition is good. Everyone is already incentivized to come up with and implement ideas faster than their compe…
The fact of the matter is that countries with weak IP laws and/or enforcement see less innovation. It makes sense too, the calculus is easy: rip someone’s tested idea off for free, or invest huge piles of money just to get your foot in the door?
The causality probably goes in the opposite direction. Countries without IP don't care much about protecting it. Countries with IP care about protecting it.
A case in point is China. It used to just produce low-value-added manufactured products, and it had little IP protection to speak of. But as China has moved up the value chain, it has passed IP laws and built out a court system to enforce them. It has rapidly become one of the most active venues for IP litigation in the world. But if there were no Chinese R&D to protect, there would be little reason for China to build out this system.
Re: The patent troll that won a $308M jury trial against Apple
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess you can decide for yourself: https://patents.google.com/?inventor=Austin+Walters
Wow. So anyone with a half baked idea can make and own a patent??
Worse: anyone whose employer thinks they have an idea may own a patent. There's an application on my name that I refused to sign and provided prior art instead. But corps gonna corp.
Re: The patent troll that won a $308M jury trial against Apple
#190The 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…
Is it really innovative if you do not implement it? I don't mean market it and make it successful, I mean just implement it. Because if the "inventor" can't implement the process described in the patent, it's not really a useful invention, is it?
I was part of litigation in the 1990s where some guy had a patent on an “electronic offertory box” for use in churches. It had been granted in the 1980s. The claims made no mention of computer networking let alone “The Internet”. Yet in 1996 he successfully sued my employer and related groups that had developed a "disaster relief" web site because it offered the ability to make electronic donations (i.e. GoFundme, but to the specific non–profit). He "won" because the parties involved found it was going to be too expensive to defend.
Now, I didn't know about the patent.
I had no way of knowing about the patent.
There literally was no way for me to have found the patent, reviewed it, and decided "yeah, an electronic offertory box is absolutely the inspiration for accepting a credit card payment online directed to a charity, and I'm going to steal that sucker". Patents were abstract things that got filed away in a basement in Washington, they were not available online, only in Lexis/Nexis sorts of electronic services that peons were not granted access to.
At my company, people like me were advised NEVER to review patents ourselves due to the jeopardy we could place ourselves in if we implemented something that might be found to infringe a patent, intentions being irrelevant.
In the end the guy got paid off, and the disaster relief site got shut down less than a year later because once he got his pay off other "innovators" started filing cases and the non–profit we were working with decided it wasn't worth the effort if they were simply diverting charitable funds to anyone who could file a patent infringement claim.
Software patents are completely useless to me as an implementor. The processes described are so vague as to be useless to solve the problems I encounter, and the claims are so broad as to cover anything related to the field of the invention. And the ever expanding pool of people who can be targeted for infringement (oh, I see you use a laser printer in your office? You're infringing these 11,000 patents. Please pay up) just means the whole enterprise is a scam.