Remember, it's a jury trial. You can only blame the total technical illiteracy outside of the career professionals in the field, and the judge maybe only for allowing that circus in the courtroom.
No but a judge can hold you in contempt if they believe you aren't basically being a genuine jury member. So lets say slavery was legal and you found it immoral. Youre in a court case over a slave that ran away. You want to find the assumed slave as not guilty because you're an abolitionist. A judge will hold you in contempt because you didn't follow the law that slavery was legal.
That's how stupid the system is. It's intentions initially were good, but nowadays it's really just made it apparent that it was for protecting affluent aristocrats from the government. Not to promote freedom for the citizens.
You can be held in contempt for trying to pursue jury nullification and urging other jurors as well.
Jury nullification is if everybody individually agreed the law is bad. But even so, a judge can request a retrial with a new jury. And your noble effort has been ruined.
Having worked for more than a decade as a jury consultant on high profile patent lawsuits, I disagree. Big verdicts are mainly attributable to lawyering and the extent to which the judge construes the patent language.
are those patents part of the 3G/4G standards? I mean getting yourself a piece of patent portfolio of a widespread standard which everybody has to implement - that isn't plain trolling, it is extortion.
It is more subtle that that. Patent holders who contributed to the 3G/4G/5G standards agree to make their standards essential patents available under FRAND terms. However, this does not apply to patent holders who have not contributed to the 3G/4G/5G standards (because they are not part of any agreement about patent licensing terms for the standard).
I can’t understand why the US law imposes a jury of laypeople to make verdict about such a technical problem. Certainly the lawyers and attorneys will try their best to make the problem accessible for the laymen but nevertheless I believe people who don’t have at least a basic grasp of these things should judge.
It might make sense in civil or criminal courts but not in technical courts.
I’ve served on a jury. Everything you’ve said applies to all juries. Every case has nuance that requires expertise and understanding, from how to appropriately consider witness testimony to what weight to put in various pieces of evidence. As nerds it’s easier to apply this reasoning to technical cases — because we think we understand the absolute truth of the situation — but it applies to non-technical trials too.
I was a juror on a DUI trial. It was surprising how the large majority of the jury was confused by the law and the slightly technical evidence; only after discussion during deliberation did the jurors start to gravitate around a reasonable decision.
In a case concerning patents, I can only imagine that deliberations might be end up akin to spinning the wheels of a slot machine.
The original reason for it was to prevent a secret police or a basically a scheme of government officials from misinterpreting laws intentionally to imprison people.
The ironic thing is though you can be held in contempt of court if you believe the law is wrong and will not want to convict someone for a law you find immoral. So it's like "whats the point" then honestly. Having a dedicated judge determine my fate is a million times better than 8 morons that are pissed they gotta be there and call in every day to see if they get summoned.
Just because people say that doesn't make it true. People can be held in contempt. If you are not on a jury and tell the jury members about nullification you may be charged with a felony. In crazy places like the 9th circuit, the jury's decision may even be overturned.
There is no fixed price, but to give an idea: the Nortel bankruptcy estate sold about 6,000 patents to a patent troll, the Rockstar Consortium, funded by Apple -- the largest stakeholder with 60% -- for about $3.2B eons ago. So that works out to about $500K per patent!
It's too bad that Apple's, or the Rockstar's, plan to troll Google/Android makers collapsed when the chief district judge saw through Apple's ulterior motive and declared California the proper legal venue for hearing patent infringement case, pulling the case out of Judge Gilstrap's hand in the the Eastern District of Texas.
Please understand that patents only serve the big companies, not the small developer. Companies like Apple, Google and Microsoft just cross-license in case there is a problem and they gain from that.
As a small developer who invented something and has patented that invention. What do you do when Apple uses that patent without informing you or paying you. Do you sue them? That will take 10 years and lots of money and will surely wear you out. The only way a small developer gets paid for a patent is by selling it to a patent troll. I guess this is how the system works.
By the way, I don't agree with software patents, and I think 20 years is too long for a patent in this day and age.
But in many industries patents benefit the small developer because they help you gain investment. If an investor sees you have reasonable patent coverage they’re more likely to give you money. Eventually if Apple sues you an investor might give you more money to fight the patent battle (if there’s a reasonable chance of a payout).
Keep in mind it's the big companies here that set out these mines:
https://patents.google.com/patent/US8019332B2/en application filed by LG Electronics Inc
https://patents.google.com/patent/US8385284B2/en application filed by Panasonic Corp
https://patents.google.com/patent/US8411557B2/en application filed by Panasonic Corp
https://patents.google.com/patent/US9001774B2/en application filed by Samsung Electronics Co
How a patent troll ended up with them, I don't know. But you can bet the only reason none of these big corps didn't use them against Apple or other big corporations is mutually assured destruction. They would not hesitate against a small company that's perceived as threatening which doesn't have a patent arsenal to fight back.
Could it be some kind of proxy warfare? Others mentioned agreements that require companies working on a standard to license their patents, so it would make sense to move them to a "patent troll" company that isn't bound by these agreements and can go after the competition without fear for reprisal.
It's karma for Steve Jobs threatening to put other companies out of business with spurious patent litigation unless they joined Apple and Google in their illegal wage fixing scheme.
> In a statement, Apple said: "Optis makes no products and its sole business is to sue companies using patents they accumulate. We will continue to defend against their attempts to extract unreasonable payments for patents they acquire."
I don't know anything about Optis, but I really don't like Apple's argument here. By this reasoning, you only get to patent things if you own factories and marketing and sales operations. If that's not you, if you're just a garage inventor, then you shouldn't be granted the patent, leaving it to be gobbled up by the likes of Apple instead. Seems very convenient for them.
Maybe it's really gigantic corporations who should not be allowed to own patents. When you're sitting on a gigantic mountain of cash like Apple, from what do you need protection?
No, the quote literally says “Optis makes no products” (nor do they plan to, ever). If you’re a garage inventor you either are making something or have ambitions to. That’s the difference and Apple is 100% correct in this instance - companies like Optis are parasites and this particular district of Texas enables them, it’s their own factory town.
Sure, that flawed argument has some appeal in simple, unitary products made for caveman in the prehistoric age.
According to RPX, it's estimated there are over 250,000+ active patents with thousands of unique inventors in any given modern smartphone today; and, of those, at least 23,00+ wireless patents were declared "standard essential" in GSM/3G alone. It's pretty dumb to argue that each individual inventor's patent, or the current assignee's, is legit if and only if they are in the business of making or productizing them themselves.
> If you’re a garage inventor you either are making something or have ambitions to.
Let's personalize it:
Fulfilling that "standard" for my own personal patents would require me to register as a financial institution and employ people with all the licenses, some of which not one individual can hold all of simultaneously, actually run that institution, launch products, get traction on those products and then pat myself on the back because all is right with the world.
All because I had a particular idea in a niche market first, which only I consider an improvement and worthwhile at the priority date, while nobody else would or did.
So as someone with much more immediately lucrative and interesting ideas, I'm clearly not going to pursue that path. So.... are people proposing I just drop the idea when I had it, or what would the other incentive to share it with the world be? I should just let others independently come up with the idea an unknown number of years in the future and just say "hey look haha I had that idea a while back", or even worse, risk allowing reality to go in a completely different or less improved direction?
I feel fortunate that I was even able to afford to make a record of my idea in the compliant and uninfringeable way. I know plenty of people that are too segregated from the system to even attempt that. It is insulting to think "ah fuck that person [with $20,000] because they didn't build a prototype in their modest garage!" The gatekeeping, how does that even make sense?
Okay so now there is a document saying I had an idea first (speaking on behalf of all patent inventors), and even more rarely and privileged is that fact that I am not having to assign all my ideas to an employer who then owns the patent.
So what is being proposed here? I'm a "non practicing entity" and all my paths to monetization are invalid because of it? Should I leave it rhetorical?
Should I say "hey cool awesome tech or fintech firm, I really admire your work, you should buy my IP" because that works so well?
Should I say "hey cool awesome tech or fintech firm, cease and desist now" because that works so well?
Should I say "hey well capitalized company in the business of monetizing intellectual property, I'm trying to recoup costs so that I can build a workbench in my garage because people on the internet will respect me more so what kind of arrangements do you have for patents again?" thats likely whats going to happen and is the path people take
So what do you and anyone passing by actually propose? Because what is suggested doesn't really make sense and hasn't really factored in what individuals do and why
This is exactly right. There's a big difference between inventing a thing and exploiting that invention. It might not even be a good time in the market to exploit the idea.
> Then why can my friends who studied mechanical engineering get rich from patents? Did I choose the wrong education?
Because mechanical engineering isn't only math? Math is used of course, but that's true about essentially all professions. But yes, if there is some sort of a pure mathematical model/equation that could apply to mechanical engineering, I'm sure the GP would also agree that it should not be patentable.
Neither is software: memory constraints, latency, reliability, cpu speed.
Almost the entire cryptography field relies on physical limitations on execution speed. Anyone working on even remotely real time systems has to account for these same limitations and possibly work around them.
Every student learns about runtime and memory complexity of various algorithms. Something that would be entirely irrelevant in a purely mathematical context. At what speed does an ideal Turing machine run? How much memory does it have?
Haha who is getting rich from patents? I started my career at a small R&D company which generated aerospace intellectual property and patents, and in general the process was slow, expensive, and not too lucrative since the patents were very specific!
It's kind of clear that entertainment would still get made without copyright. But the videos thesis around drug discovery is much less well thought through.
I'd be interested in seeing someone think these issues through more deeply. For example I know a reasonable amount about the development of next-gen DNA sequencers. How would developments like this have played out in a world without patents?
It doesn't seem feasible to say that academics would be willing to prepay to fund the development of a life science tool that might help their research and appear in 10 years time or might just fail and not get developed at all. Research markets were the initial markets for these instruments.
Same goes for drug discovery, perhaps they need some new analytical tool. So do they directly fund multiple high risk approaches to develop this tool? In our current scenario VCs/startups take on this risk, in exchange for a time limited monopoly.
It doesn't seem reasonable to expect individual drug development companies to take on this risk. Do they ask prospective users of the drug to pay these downstream development costs? Do they take out a loan to cover the development costs?
How about we reduce the patent validity to few years? The exceptions should benefit the public too. IF they can't meet the demand they should be forced to sell their patent for that time.
Someone here posted a while back the idea that maybe force a patent renewal every few years. Say original patents are good for 5 years and you can renew at an increasing fee each year after up to 15 years.
There are solutions, it just takes the political will. The patent office is funded through patent fees and appears to suffer no consequence for issuing bad patents. So the patent office seems to be encouraged to keep issuing patents good or bad…
In the US patent maintenance fees are due at 3.5, 7.5 and 11.5 years after issuance.
They are increasingly expensive, with the 11.5 year fee being $7700.
You could raise these fees, but how are you going to set them? Based on industry? Ultimately just feels like you’d end up making things harder for individual inventors and easier for big businesses and patent trolls.
Personally I think there are a few reforms that might work. Firstly, software patents do not seem to be useful. They don’t seem to have been required for the development of the software industry, and in general they’ve not been allowed in the past.
Secondly, patents should never prevent the sale or incorporation of a technology into a product. Courts should always demand royalties be paid to the patent holder, based on the profit the infringing party receives.
That’s much more problematic. But it feels like there should be a way to incentivize the continued sale of products so that a company can’t just sit on a patent.
You could maybe tax them at an appraised value, such that the patent right has to be licensed at at most x% of that value. If they under value then it's cheaper to license it, if they overvalue they pay more tax?
Or maybe a first-sale doctrine that allows a single sale but doesn't allow further sales. You better be sure you want it because once you bought it the resale value is zero? Then troll companies wouldn't be able to sweep up lots of older patents to use in trolling.
Or, it could be like trade marks, of you're not using the patent in a product then you lose it, unless you're the original inventor. If I sell you the patent, then you keep it to troll with you have to make a product that uses it, and sell that product, otherwise the patent expires. It doesn't return to the inventor - they got paid - it enters the public domain.
These ideas are entirely my own and presented for entertainment only.
> Or maybe a first-sale doctrine that allows a single sale but doesn't allow further sales.
Nitpick: that’s the exact opposite of the “first sale doctrine”. The first sale doctrine says that, once I buy something, I can do whatever I want with the product. If I want to shoot bullets at a $1000 smartphone for YouTube views, Apple, Samsung, etc. can’t prevent me from doing so.
There are exceptions to this (EULAs and all that), but the general idea is that.
Yes, that was confusing: 'The' first-sale doctrine is about exhaustion of the rights of an IPR holder though (as you correctly state); a consumer can resell because the creator of the IPR no longer has power over the goods.
My off-the-cuff proposal would be 'a' first-sale doctrine that would exhaust the rights of an IPR creator by preventing them from being transferred. To a [further] third party. This mirrors 'the' first-sale doctrine.
Of course 'a' first-sale doctrine is just a protocol related to a first transference - in the case you reference that's transference of goods to a consumer, in my proposal the transference was of IPR rights to a manufacturer/troll/company.
All those things require costly government mandated testing.
But it feels like the same arguments could apply to many things. Many deep tech projects require 100M+ to develop, and it’s difficult for me to see how these projects might get funded.
Hah, I think that video actually made a pretty good case _for_ IP - the idea that everything would be funded like Starcitizen sounds like a nightmare. Squeezing the most fervent customers dry while having no obligation to actually deliver. At least currently we get finished products that have to stand on their own merits, rather than just vague promises.
Not to mention that for software there's a good chance that this would just supercharge DRM and SaaS.
I'm waiting for patent war on open source. Apple, Microsoft etc can kill any competing open source project using their patent pool. Has this happened already?
Patent enforcement typically requires shipping a product. The open source projects themselves would be fine, but downstream users of the code could be forced to license. See for example exFAT on Android.
There’s got to be a compromise between having an idea first and disclosing it, having your patent drafters make it as broad as possible such that even you barely recognize it, and the expectation to have a trillion dollars of capital to attempt making the idea viable
The “trolls” or non practicing entities are just as much a piece of this system as everyone else. The patent inventor has to recoup as $15000 is a lot to them, the trolls have to recoup as their millions of dollars of patent purchases is a lot to them, and the companies that build use unfathomable amounts of capital to build at all and it is ridiculous to suggest the inventor or the NPE do that.
Maybe the government should just buy patents and not leverage them. If there is no comprehensive patent regulatory change people can agree on.
No one owes the inventors or patent companies anything for bad patents. They're meant to do a specific thing and I think we're light years away from that at this point. At least originally with mechanical patents you had the basic working form of the idea but with software patents there's nothing there.
> In a statement, Apple said: "Optis makes no products and its sole business is to sue companies using patents they accumulate. We will continue to defend against their attempts to extract unreasonable payments for patents they acquire."
I don't understand this approach. I hate patent trolls as much as anyone else, but my feelings are irrelevant to the laws, no? Who cares what Apple lawyers feel honestly? Where does it say in patent laws that only patents you are utilizing to the max 24/7 are viable and "real patents"?
Patent trolls are patent trolls but as SC said many times, if you don't like how we interpret current laws, change them and make them more precise.
Besides, its not like Apple hasn't been a "patent troll" themselves - anyone remembers Apple vs Samsung re too much curved corners?
You can disagree with the merits of a patent fight all you want - but suing over a design patent for a product you ship and sell millions of units of, is the literal opposite of a patent troll.
It’s just PR. It matters to Apple whether the story is “Apple steals tech from tech startup & gets sued” vs. “patent troll frivolously sues Apple”. It’s not to convince a judge, it’s for the court of public opinion. Lawyers spinning the story in the press to make their side look better is not a new phenomenon…
The law on patents is that you have to make and sell products using those patents, either by "use in commerce", showing that it's currently in-use, or that you have a "bona fide intent to use the mark".
What is the difference really. The company bought patents from an another company that maybe wanted to use them, or used them, and sold them
They put work into them. Apple, one of the largest patent holders in the world, is telling it don't accept patent law. The same law they use to hold one of the largest pool of patents in the world both created internally and bought from other companies.
The same company that most likely will become a patent "troll" or sell patents to one when the business will decline.
I wonder if Gilstrap's shoulders ever hurt from singlehandedly holding up the entire world of patent trolling.