141–150 of 164 posts
Almost as much as the $1B Apple was originally supposed to win from Samsung for equally silly patents. (It's since been slashed down to a tenth of that, but still.) Is it too much to say "live by the sword, die by the sword"?
If you like. But Apple is not a "non-practicing entity"
The large companies seem to be constantly in patent battles, often with each other, both as plaintiffs and as defendants. They win some and lose some. Since this is unproductive activity, due to lawyer bills and the diversion of attention from their core businesses, it simply must be a net loss for those players. Why don't they call each other up, declare a truce, and cooperate in lobbying Congress to fix (i.e. large…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> work to mask the consistent refusal by the courts in the Eastern District to end meritless cases before trial. More trials should mean more money for lawyers in the area, judges, ancillary people like stenographers and clerks.
I'm 75-90% sure federal judges are on salary, and are not paid by the case. At least I hope this is so.
If they changed something so caseload fell by 75%, do you think some judges might lose their job?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow. > somehow a mindset has developed there which is at odds with most other patent cases in the US. Different courts form slightly different interpretations. There's a reason that the 2nd Circuit is the most liberal court. This court happens to be the most pro-plaintiff patent court you can find. It's not surprising the plaintiffs file there. > This is a part of the country which has very little Have you ever been…
>Do you think Apple fighting a court case floods money down the street like a river? Yes. Lawyers have to eat, and they get paid enough to eat well. They need a place to stay, and they get paid enough to stay at a nice hotel. They need coffee, they need an airport, they need a rental car that needs gas. Your argument is that having people come to your city doesn't add to the local economy, but the fact that whole cit…
And that was a small company. Multiply that by 1000x and then add the defense payoffs from big corps...
The thing is that East Texas no longer has a monopoly on this - more jurisdictions are opening up to handling patent litigation (not sure what's driving that).
The large companies seem to be constantly in patent battles, often with each other, both as plaintiffs and as defendants. They win some and lose some. Since this is unproductive activity, due to lawyer bills and the diversion of attention from their core businesses, it simply must be a net loss for those players. Why don't they call each other up, declare a truce, and cooperate in lobbying Congress to fix (i.e. large…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can we just please abolish patents? Not just software patents, all of them. Can anyone give me an example of a patent issued in the last twenty years for a novel invention that then proved wildly successful and either protected the inventor from competition or even more importantly led to a lawsuit where the creator successfully beat a large company trying to copy their idea? And even if you can - is the exception ou…
Big pharma, for all its flaws, does in fact provide value. And drug research & development absolutely relies on patents. If you spend half a billion (or more) developing a drug and generic drug manufacturers can immediately sell it for a few cents a pill, how do you recoup your investment? I agree the patent system is broken, but abolishing it entirely isn't the answer. Perhaps revoking the business method patent dec…
It is important to not just consider the position of a pharmaceutical research corporations impact on the economy but the broader picture. Their research is often subsidized by the dying and suffering, or in the era of the PPACA it might be subsidized in part by a corporation that has to spread out that burden broadly to all healthcare subscribers.
The poor are sicker, on average, than the rich. Their reduced access to medicine makes their complications work, and the environments they are forced into often cause their more illness.
The drug R&D system we have now disproportionately extracts its funding from everyone above medicaid (and even on medicaid you can only get partial drug coverage) and anyone below a reasonable standard of living.
There are multiple ways to intervene into this system to produce as much research as we have now with an alternative funding model.
Since the majority of the consumers of these drugs are on national healthcare programs (usually medicare or medicaid - old or poor) we could simply transition to expansive national funding programs for private research, or public drug R&D. The revenue barely shifts hands then, but the problem becomes that the state is an awful judge of value and as demonstrated by NASA or the DoD is a terrible judge of what deserves funding or how much to give.
This system isn't even theoretical, Bernie and Obama have already proposed such laws: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prizes_as_an_alternative_to_pa...
The other consequence is that since IP and patents are pure fiction in reality and must be constructed as a state institution to enforce, countries like China and India can just ignore US patents on drugs, instead manufacturing and distributing the fruits of American and European labor (since we end up paying the overpriced patent prices) abroad for no cost.
Is it worth aggressively pursuing research when the least able to afford it often ends up having to pay for it? How do we know that competitive drug research would not be done through institutional and charitable funding, like how a ton of other research works? Even in the absence of patents, there are upstart costs to building and manufacturing drugs. And within the drug industry, people often ignore that the most central reason why pharma R&D needs to spend so much ludicrous money is because of the FDA regulations involving getting their drugs approved. If drugs were more deregulated - less of a problem in the information age, when research can easily be distributed and problems broadcast internationally within minutes of discovery - we could dramatically cut the costs of research such that traditional manufacturing models, that have worked for years, could work the same for making pills.
Personally, I think a combination of substantive deregulation (you could still have FDA approval, and even a law where doctors need to notify consumers when they are prescribing experimental drugs and the risks involved, but they would not be mandatory to start selling and profiting), research prizes, public funding, private charity (a lot of cancer research is charitable, and almost any ailment of great duress also gets incredible amounts of charitable research funding) and the recognition that using a guaranteed monopoly only enforced in the western world disproportionately hurts the sick, and thus hurts the elderly and poor who either have to pay partials under state coverage or have to pay entirely out of pocket.
The large companies seem to be constantly in patent battles, often with each other, both as plaintiffs and as defendants. They win some and lose some. Since this is unproductive activity, due to lawyer bills and the diversion of attention from their core businesses, it simply must be a net loss for those players. Why don't they call each other up, declare a truce, and cooperate in lobbying Congress to fix (i.e. large…
Doesn't work when the companies in question exist purely for patent lawsuits
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even that's selectively looking at the facts though. At some point they paid for those patents, and that theoretically put money in the pockets of creators, incentivizing them to create more. That said, to my eyes it's clearly a subversion of the intended purpose of patents, and is societally damaging, so I see no problem with derogatory labeling of this behavior and those that take part in it. It's unfortunate, but…
That's not selectively looking at the facts at all. The facts are plain: - company buys patents for the purpose of seeking rents - company aggressively pursues others who are independently creating potentially valuable products to shake them down for rents - company produces nothing of value with the patent except for increased wealth transfer by extracting value from others' work That they [theoretically] put money…
Actually, depending on your definition of rent seeking, it either makes it rent-seeking or not, so it may affect those facts. Would inventors be incentivized to create as much if there wasn't a market for these types of patents? Even if you discounts the type of patents that trolls attempt to control as useless, can we say that those crappy patents didn't subsidize better inventions?
Now, I'm not defending patent trolls, just noting that it may be a mistake to assume there is no economic value to what they do, even though the net outcome is likely negative. The positive and negative consequences may not be entirely comparable, making this easy to overlook.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/02/jury-apple-must-p... "East Texas Jury"...
I don't get this. Is there some paid off official there? Different standards? Why is it such a great place to win patent troll suits - which seem to get overturned in higher courts? Is the idea that a win there will stop the defendant from trying to appeal?