Newegg vs. Patent Trolls: When We Win, You Win • Hacker News Board

Re: Newegg vs. Patent Trolls: When We Win, You Win

#141

Post by harry8 » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 2:19 AM UTC

sliverstorm wrote: post #94

devy wrote: post #69

Erich Spangenberg is America's most notorious patent troll mafia head. I blames him for taking full advantage of the broken U.S. patent system to squeeze upward of $30 billion each year and the tremendous waste of use our legal system resources. EFF[1] and NYT[2] ran full reports on him previously. [1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/07/times-profiles-patent-... [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/14/business/has-p…

There's parasites in nature, no reason to think there wouldn't be parasites in human society...

What do we do with parasites when they attack us? That.

Re: Newegg vs. Patent Trolls: When We Win, You Win

#142

Post by akshatpradhan » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 3:15 AM UTC

throwawaykf05 wrote: post #109

akshatpradhan wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is actually a very important observation. The entire modus operandi of patent trolls is to go after the weak. Let's not kid ourselves when suggesting incompetent lawyers can't gain competence.

> The entire modus operandi of patent trolls is to go after the weak. This is not true. Giants like Apple, Google and Microsoft get sued all the time. They face hundreds of troll lawsuits at any given time.

Citation for hundreds of troll lawsuits? I'm only seeing one or two incidents when I google up Microsoft Patent Troll or Google Patent Troll.

Re: Newegg vs. Patent Trolls: When We Win, You Win

#143

Post by mcv » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 10:10 AM UTC

eigenvector wrote: post #96

adebtlawyer wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US system is also supposed to be a process of truth-finding, just that we leave the parties to support their own positions as adversaries. Without advocacy, American courts do very little on their own. So far that doesn't bother me, but I'm a lawyer. For someone thrown into the system, there can be an incorrect expectation that the court will automatically act to do justice.

Part of the problem with the adversarial system is that if one party has bad lawyers, you can end up with bad case law as a result of them failing to properly argue their case.

You could end up with one party intentionally losing a case in order to establish precedent that they expect to profit from in the future, because they expect they'll usually be on the other side of similar cases.

Re: Newegg vs. Patent Trolls: When We Win, You Win

#144

Post by mcv » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 10:14 AM UTC

dtparr wrote: post #64

tachion wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are other countries, where this issue is solved (more or less) by the fact that the side which have lost the case is covering trial costs. This does stop 'court trolling' because even is the cost of winning the case is higher than the cost of the settlement, winning the case nullifies that cost. But hey, US is special this way! (and many others... ;)

How do they avoid disincentivizing small parties from suing larger ones in this system? Let's say I have a strong case (say 90% chance of winning) to sue an insurance company for, say, $50k. But the cost of their legal team/experts/discovery to defend it is, ~$500k, then things look a bit more bleak. Are there caps? Is one side prohibited from charging substantially more than the other?

Limit the cost to reasonable costs. What is reasonable? Well, limiting the expense to the lower of the two parties' legal costs would strongly discourage the larger party from spending $500k on the case. And if they do it anyway, they pay for it themselves.

Re: Newegg vs. Patent Trolls: When We Win, You Win

#145

Post by mcv » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 10:25 AM UTC

zeidrich wrote: post #140

mcherm wrote: post #14

I really appreciate Newegg's approach here -- one of the main reasons that patent trolling is so successful is that the cost of settling is smaller even than the cost of winning a suit. Newegg is performing an (expensive) community service. How should I be supporting them (other than making them my "first place to check" for electronics shopping)?

I don't know if I agree. The thing is, what Newegg is doing, especially by publicizing it is to tell trolls to avoid Newegg. That's great for Newegg, but it means that future trolls will skip them, and just go after the startups and small businesses that don't have the resources to fight a lawsuit on principal. I'm not saying that what Newegg is doing is bad, or even that it doesn't help. I'm just saying that the pub…

What we need is a big party willing to defend all the small parties.

How about some sort of patent troll insurance that takes over your defense and sues to invalidate the patent? The insurance should cost a smaller amount of money than settlement would cost. The more companies have that insurance, the bigger the defense you can mount, and the lower the costs for everybody are.

The first person sued by the troll immediately takes it to court and wins, invalidating the patent, and ensuring that only one lawsuit will have to be fought and everybody else is safe.

Of course this could mean that a lot of people feel they don't need the insurance because someone else will invalidate the patent for them, but if the list of people and companies protected by this insurance is public, those without it will be the first to be sued. So eventually, everybody will want this insurance, and the trolls will be forced to take it to court every time.

There's got to be a business model in this.

Re: Newegg vs. Patent Trolls: When We Win, You Win

#146

Post by jon-wood » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 10:56 AM UTC

dtparr wrote: post #78

jon-wood wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe it's at the judges discretion. There was recently a case against a journalist who paid bribes on behalf of a news corporation in which the judge outright stated that if the corporation had been paying costs he would have ruled for a much larger costs settlement then he did when it emerged the journalist himself was going to have to pay. The remainder gets picked up by the taxpayer, so whatever happens the w…

So in my scenario, the public would finance most of the insurance company's defense if I lost?

Standard disclaimer: you should consult an actual solicitor!

I think it would somewhat depend on the judge's assessment of the situation, but I would think so long as you're acting in good faith they'd likely rule for you to pay whatever costs you can afford, and the rest would be covered by public finances.

It wouldn't surprise me to hear of judges deciding that the defence's legal team is grossly excessive and telling them they're not claiming for everything either, at least in the UK judges have quite a lot of leeway in what they can do in their own court room.

Re: Newegg vs. Patent Trolls: When We Win, You Win

#147

Post by _nedR » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 3:50 PM UTC

ScottBurson wrote: post #114

adebtlawyer wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having litigated against adversaries who use the courts primarily to be a nuisance, with little or no regard to the actual strength or weakness of their claims, I've become convinced "loser pays costs and attorney's fees of prevailing party" is a better system than what we have in the U.S.

There's an important qualifier: loser pays reasonable costs of prevailing party, and the judge decides what is reasonable. It's not automatic. This addresses the concerns about a deep-pocketed party spending lavishly and winning, and the loser being forced to pay a massive legal bill. (I'm not an expert on the subject, but it's been discussed before on HN, and this is my recollection.) It occurs to me that an interes…

>>There's an important qualifier: loser pays reasonable costs of prevailing party,

I remember a comment a while back on HN or somewhere which suggested an approximate solution to this : the loser must pay the costs equal to its or the winners fees- whichever is lower.

Re: Newegg vs. Patent Trolls: When We Win, You Win

#148

Post by Lawtonfogle » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 5:29 PM UTC

Aaronontheweb wrote: post #137

Lawtonfogle wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would only boost behavior that takes advantage of massive numbers of weaker individuals because in the rare case of one of them winning, you are only going to get a minor fee. If the max cost of predatory practices isn't much higher than the gain from using them in the rare cases when caught, it creates an incentive to use such practices.

> If the max cost of predatory practices isn't much higher than the gain from using them in the rare cases when caught, it creates an incentive to use such practices. This isn't a complete economic argument in favor of companies behaving poorly. Punitive damages pale in comparison to a threat of loss of future business dealings as a result of poor behavior. Japan, for instance, prohibits punitive damages. Is there an…

>Punitive damages pale in comparison to a threat of loss of future business dealings as a result of poor behavior.

That fully depends upon how you simulate humans in one's argument. For a generally rational generally well informed human this is likely true (note I'm not even going with the 'fully rational fully informed'). But for the majority of consumers, there is less cost and there are ways to reduce the cost further. There will be some impact when the news breaks (if it breaks, the story being publicly available is a world of difference from the story being CNN/Fox New's headline of the day), but people will quickly lose interest or otherwise stop caring. While punitive damages may not be enough to fix the issue, I think there is an issue and I think the issue would be worse without them.

Re: Newegg vs. Patent Trolls: When We Win, You Win

#149

Post by throwawaykf05 » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 7:30 PM UTC

CamperBob2 wrote: post #119

throwawaykf05 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain why you think patents hinder progress of science and the useful arts? How many cases do you know of that people were unable to advance the arts because of a patent? People talk about patent trolls suing startups and main street shops: How many of them actually do anything technically innovative? Hinder commercialization of some old technology? Sure, patents can do that. Stifle progress? Not so much. T…

How many cases do you know of that people were unable to advance the arts because of a patent? For one concrete example, anyone who worked on data compression outside of purely academic areas has been harmed, and by extension their customers have been harmed, by early software patents in that area. The LZW patent (infamously associated with the .GIF file format) and IBM's patents on arithmetic coding both rendered en…

I'm looking at actual data. You are speaking from hearsay and anecdotes. Here's a paper to get started with. It is a review of dozens of papers most of which have empirical results:

http://eml.berkeley.edu//~bhhall/papers/HallHarhoff12_NBER_w...

Your example is not concrete. What you think of as "radioactive" could simply be researchers concluding that specific area was not worth exploring anymore. Here's how you can give a concrete example: Those patents have expired. Can you point to any new fundamentally significant compression technology that has since emerged that could have been thought of as being previously held back by those patents?

Now I can give a concrete example of how those very same patents caused innovation: When they sued people over lzw in gifs, that prompted people to develop alternate methods like PNG. Sounds like progress to me. Was it forced innovation? Sure! But that's always been one of the rationalizations of patents. People often don't innovate unless forced to.

>My impression is based on decades of work in the industry.

So let's get even more anecdotal: how often have you been unable to "advance the arts" due to a patent?

> How many land mines ever explode?

How many good ideas get ripped off with their creator getting nothing in return? If we want to be hyperbolic, I could just say "anti-patent people are just intellectual thieves, nothing more, nothing less"?

Re: Newegg vs. Patent Trolls: When We Win, You Win

#150

Post by throwawaykf05 » Thu, Jul 30, 2015, 7:38 PM UTC

akshatpradhan wrote: post #142

throwawaykf05 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The entire modus operandi of patent trolls is to go after the weak. This is not true. Giants like Apple, Google and Microsoft get sued all the time. They face hundreds of troll lawsuits at any given time.

Citation for hundreds of troll lawsuits? I'm only seeing one or two incidents when I google up Microsoft Patent Troll or Google Patent Troll.

Here's one link:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/02/apple-top-target-...

Mentions Google, Apple and Samsung (respectively 192, 191, 151 lawsuits over last 5 years). Microsoft has mentioned similar numbers, but I can't find a reference off hand. Google for "patent trolls target Microsoft"