12 ms·

East Texas judge throws out 168 patent cases

239 points by teachingaway 11y ago

daveloyall 11y ago
Can't wait read the EFF article about this.
hga 11y ago
Heh. More evidence for something I've been hearing for a while, the mass quantities of patent lawsuits in this "rocket docket" has had the side effect of educating everyone in it about this area of law, and it's getting harder to win a bad case.
- Alex3917 11y ago
  All of the software patent trolls are pretty much going to be out of business in the next 12 - 18 months. It costs millions of dollars to run these operations, and most of them haven't been making any income for 2+ years now. All the smart trolls have moved on to trolling PTAB, and the dumb ones are just holding out hope that they either hit one last jackpot or else find some other way to monetize their portfolio.
  - devit 11y ago
    What does "trolling PTAB" mean?
    - tacon 11y ago
      >Scott McKeown has identified what he believes are some instances of parties not involved in a case of patent litigation using the inter partes review (IPR) procedure to squeeze money out of patent owners who’ve won court cases but haven’t yet received a check. Since IPRs are conducted by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) you could call these operators “PTAB Trolls.” [1]http://www.ipnav.com/blog/ptab-trolls-going-after-patent-owners/ http://www.ipnav.com/blog/ptab-trolls-going-after-patent-own...
      - devit 11y ago
        If patent trolls are moving to this, it seems to be a great development for society, since it makes patent trolling itself by both NPEs and PEs less profitable or unprofitable. The legal system still seem to be broken, because it should offer a large reward to the "PTAB troll" to be paid by the patent owner so that instead of settling they would go through and invalidate the patent, while still getting money from the patent owner, who would also lose the money from the (non-)infringer.
  - kanzure 11y ago
    > All of the software patent trolls are pretty much going to be out of business in the next 12 - 18 months Sounds like an opportunity to me. They might have existing licensing revenue and they are going to be wondering what to do if patent trolling ain't the name of their game anymore.
  - adebtlawyer 11y ago
    > It costs millions of dollars to run these operations Are you sure? Litigation isn't always expensive if you're doing it in-house.
    - throwawaykf05 11y ago
      Or even on contingency. That is, lawyers will do this for free and take cut of the payout, if any. The good thing about this model is that nobody wants to waste resources on a fruitless lawsuit, so they will only go ahead with cars that have more merit relatively.
    - ww520 11y ago
      Lawyer fee is expensive. Discovery is expensive. Patent discovery can run from weeks to months of expert time. Those can quickly add up.
      - adebtlawyer 11y ago
        I said 'in-house.' That means lawyers on staff on salaries, not fees to outside counsel. Work costs money, sure, but I'm skeptical of 'millions of dollars.'
  - mtgx 11y ago
    Seems Microsoft made the patent "deal" with Google just in time. Soon they wouldn't have had any leverage to "threaten" companies with patent lawsuits.
  - WildUtah 11y ago
    "It costs millions of dollars to run these operations" It costs millions on the defense side. The plaintiffs don't have any documents to discover and the attorneys are usually the partners in the scam, so it's almost free to them. That's the whole point of trolling in East Texas: the court rules make it even more expensive to be a defendant and cheaper to be a plaintiff.
- monochromatic 11y ago
  This is a decision from Judge Gilstrap though, not from a jury. So it doesn't have anything to do with "educating everyone."
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    Federal judges are not created with deep and intimate practical knowledge born of experience of the ins and outs of every area of federal law; they get educated by experience like anyone else.
    - monochromatic 11y ago
      Well, sure. But this is the Eastern District of Texas, where it's a reasonable guess that the judges are pretty patent-savvy.
      - dragonwriter 11y ago
        Its EDTX, where the judges (and everyone else, including the local jury pool) have over time gotten more patent savvy, because of the propensity to file patent cases in that district. Which is kind of the point of the "educating everyone" statement, as I understand it.
        monochromatic 11y ago
        I guess. I dunno, I just always see lots of comments about how the EDTX judges are awful/pro-patent/getting kickbacks/whatever. So the idea that, hey, they just needed to be educated by presiding over a few cases... it's odd.
        hga 11y ago
        A lot of the comments I've seen to that effect are rank bigotry (I suppose I should disclaim I myself am from flyover country, extreme SW Missouri, which is culturally part of the South, and for that matter my mother is Cajun). What's so difficult to believe about people being able to learn through experience? If any of these EDTX judges got reversed on appeal, that would have been a learning experience ^_^. And dragonwriter's understanding is correct.
- Zikes 11y ago
  Hopefully this means folks will have more opportunities for appeals on cases that were managed under less knowledgeable judges.
PythonicAlpha 11y ago
It should be more such judges, until the politicians got some brains. Many modern (software related) patents are bringing no advances at all, but are simply claim-pitching of corporations like in the gold-rush times.
saosebastiao 11y ago
Is it normal in other areas of the law for the plaintiff to be able to choose the (extremely favorable) district and judge for the case? Cause I can't imagine this happening in any other area of law, either civil or criminal. It just doesn't seem right, especially when the bias is so clearly observable. IANAL though...
- slapshot 11y ago
  Nearly all aesbestos class action litigation is filed in Oakland --- it is perceived to have a favorable jury pool and you can always find a dockworker in Oakland who may have had contact. Forum shopping is so popular that it has a name: "forum shopping."
  - wclax04 11y ago
    New York too
- runevault 11y ago
  It certainly can happen in certain other areas of the law. Recent example: the NFL filed in new York to prevent Tom Brady from filing in MN on the whole deflategate punishment case to try and avoid Brady getting a judge who consistently rules for the player in such cases.
- AnimalMuppet 11y ago
  You can file in any jurisdiction in which you have legal standing to file, which means any jurisdiction in which harm has been done to you. If you patent something, and someone infringes on it, and sells the infringing device nation-wide, this means that you can pick any jurisdiction nation-wide to sue them in. Normally, you pick the one that you live in, so that you don't have to travel. But for patents, many people pick East Texas, since they're more likely to get the verdict they want there.
  - larrys 11y ago
    "so that you don't have to travel." Or perhaps better actually where your attorneys are located?
stanleydrew 11y ago
Progress is slow when it comes to patent reform. Judges have a lot of control over how fast it happens, since they're really the only ones who can make binding decisions. Of course it would be great if the patent office had made better decisions in the first place, but that ship sailed long ago.
- x5n1 11y ago
  ... and the legislature can reform all of this over night, but big money and big business won't let it. they like the safety of patents even if they are not going to war with them. same mentally as guns i guess.
  - Floegipoky 11y ago
    *Systemic corruption won't let it Let's call it what it is
  - cheepin 11y ago
    For most of the people I know that aren't in tech, patent reform isn't remotely on their radar. Congress isn't going to go against the money for an issue that doesn't have overwhelming popular support. Is there even a consensus on what would fix the problem? Banning software patents just covers one edge case, but there are plenty more issues in patent law. Patents in all fields clearly slow down innovation by allowing the holder to slow down or stop derivative works. The common counter to removing patents altogether is big pharmacy. I don't know how much sympathy I can have for big pharmaceuticals either with how much they get away with: even with unpatented drugs we see anti-competitive behavior with companies like Turing. Clearly the innovation is profitable enough that funding it publicly and then reaping the benefit publicly shouldn't be a problem, right? The other objection is that it promotes secrets over open innovation, but I'm not sure that is too valid either. The current status quo gags profitable utilization of research for 20 years. Surely there's an acceptable alternative.
    - throwawaykf05 11y ago
      >Patents in all fields clearly slow down innovation by allowing the holder to slow down or stop derivative works. This theory is not supported by empirical evidence. There is plenty of evidence showing how industries became more innovative with the introduction of patent protection. This theory may however apply to industries where innovation is incremental and where claim boundaries are hard to define, like software, but evidence is hard to come by and only now are we seeing some empirical studies on the matter.
iraphael 11y ago
> the patent describes (...) routine tasks that could be performed by a human. Is this a good way of defining when a patent is invalid? Isn't everything (i.e.: all computations) technically tasks that could be performed by humans alone given enough time?
- adebtlawyer 11y ago
  The key word is 'routine.' Patentable subject matter is supposed to be non-obvious, in other words, innovative.
  - monochromatic 11y ago
    In a post-Alice world, anyway. Pre-Alice, patentable subject matter and nonobviousness were separate requirements.
    - adebtlawyer 11y ago
      I'm not familiar with Alice. As far as I know, you're right, non-obviousness is different than patentable subject matter. Sorry to elide them together like that. I never claimed to be patent lawyer.
      - monochromatic 11y ago
        Not a problem, you did just as well as the U.S. Supreme Court. (Alice is a mess in my opinion, if you couldn't tell--it mixes two requirements that were supposed to completely separate.)
- protomyth 11y ago
  you missed the second part: 'eDekka said its patent claims to "improve the functioning of technology," but Gilstrap ruled the claimed improvements simply weren't present. None of the eDekka claims met the standard for patenting, Gilstrap found.'
- WildUtah 11y ago
TheMagicHorsey 11y ago
Software patents are pitched as a policy choice that encourages programmers by giving them some financial incentive to invent more software. That's how they have been pitched to programmers and the American people. However, after having worked in the patent industry for a few years now, I can tell you software patents are really just a mechanism to redistribute the wealth of engineers to lawyers. Period. That's the end result. Nothing more. I wish this was some sort of exaggeration. But it isn't in my opinion.
- jMyles 11y ago
  Sometimes, there's a comment that just so tersely and poignantly coalescences my objection to a public policy of enormous import but minuscule attention. This is one of those.
- throwawaykf05 11y ago
  Here's the thing: It's not us engineers who pay the lawyers. It's our employers. We don't even get a say in the matter, and over time various changes in the law have simply tipped the balance even more in favor of the employers. Your employer can file a patent on your work whether you cooperate or not. And it's not like they are going to pay us more if they stop filing patents. In fact, many firms pay a bonus if your work results in a patent (or even a patent application.) Clearly they see some value in them, and they have reasons to. And this is true of all patents, btw, not just in software.
  - jaredhansen 11y ago
    >And it's not like they are going to pay us more if they stop filing patents. This is actually not true at all. The cost here isn't in the filing of the patents; it's in the nightmarish patent system that results in absurd litigation and related expenses. If the patent system were reformed to avoid this kind of expense, the company would have lower operating costs, which would be distributed in some way. While it's possible I suppose that 100% of those savings would be collected by shareholders as profit, it's much more likely that, like with anything else, the cost reductions would simply contribute to the size of the total pie, which would be split among owners and employees in proportions probably roughly similar to how it's split today.
bsimpson 11y ago
> reformed rules would have forced trolls like eDekka to actually explain how their targets infringe their patents. However, that's not currently a requirement How is it even possible to sue somebody for something you can't show that they did?
- throwawaykf05 11y ago
  You are supposed to prove it during the lawsuit, but you can get one filed just on "belief" and vague accusations. This stays the lawyers bills running for the defendant while the plaintiff can just wait, which is a tactic often resulting in early settlements. In the US there is something called rule 11 that prevents you from filing bad faith lawsuits, but it is a pretty low bar. IMO if this is strengthened by, say, requiring detailed claim charts up front, it can go a long way in deterring nuisance lawsuits.
- monochromatic 11y ago
  It's a question of how much specificity you need when you're first starting the suit. Discovery is the process in a civil lawsuit that lets you figure out exactly what happened.
throwawaykf05 11y ago
If you look past the common rhetoric against ED Texas about bring patentee-friendly and look at the data, this is not really surprising. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1597919 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1597919 ED Texas did get a bad rap for being plaintiff-friendly early on, but that didn't last long at all, as the data shows. These days it seems to be favored for being a relatively fast docket and having judges with more patent-expertise.
- magicalist 11y ago
  > These days it seems to be favored for being a relatively fast docket and having judges with more patent-expertise. Uh, neither of those are really true, the fast docket is especially wrong. In fact, there are a host of reasons why the Eastern District is popular (your source is wildly out of date due to changes since 2010). There's a reason that 44% of all patent cases for the first half of 2015 were filed in the district[1]. Juries do indeed rule for defendants there a decent amount of the time, but the rules tend to be very plaintiff-friendly in the sense that they make it very expensive to go to court at all, making settling seem all the more attractive (which just so happened to be the exact business plan of the article's subject, eDekka LLC :) Lots of sources linked in [1] [1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/08/deep-dive-why-we-need-venue-reform-restore-fairness-patent-litigation https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/08/deep-dive-why-we-need-...
  - monochromatic 11y ago
    The fact that it has patent-savvy judges is absolutely a reason why many plaintiffs file there. Ignorant judges are unpredictable.
    - magicalist 11y ago
      But there aren't especially patent-savvy judges there when compared to many other districts, like the District of Delaware or the Eastern District of Virginia, both also very experienced as patent-litigating districts of choice.
  - 11y ago
rebootthesystem 11y ago
Case after case we continue to see a pattern of apparent ignorance, incompetence or indifference on the part of the patent office. I read through the claims. This patent should not have been granted. You can go back to the 1980's and find relevant prior art. Are they playing "dumb" because of self preservation? In other words, if the patent office became really strict and only a handful of patents were granted every year they'd only need a fraction of the people, infrastructure and organization now in place. People would lose their jobs. And so, if you want to keep your job, you issue patents like we are in the middle of a new scientific renaissance. More patents means more money being pumped into the system which, in turn, means you get to keep your job, your benefits and an amazing lifetime pension you did not pay for. You know you the patents you are letting through are crap but all you care about is your financial well being. You htink "Let the courts and those rich fucks sort it out" and move on. Is it possible that the feedback loop at the patent office is such that volume, rather than quality, is what's remunerated? Never mind that this destroys innovation and causes huge financial losses across all kinds of businesses. The fitness function might be such that optimization delivers exactly what we do not want as a nation but what the patent office, as an isolated organism, needs for survival.

239 points by teachingaway 11y ago

Can't wait read the EFF article about this.

hga 11y ago

Heh. More evidence for something I've been hearing for a while, the mass quantities of patent lawsuits in this "rocket docket" has had the side effect of educating everyone in it about this area of law, and it's getting harder to win a bad case.

Alex3917 11y ago
All of the software patent trolls are pretty much going to be out of business in the next 12 - 18 months. It costs millions of dollars to run these operations, and most of them haven't been making any income for 2+ years now. All the smart trolls have moved on to trolling PTAB, and the dumb ones are just holding out hope that they either hit one last jackpot or else find some other way to monetize their portfolio.
- devit 11y ago
  What does "trolling PTAB" mean?
  - tacon 11y ago
    >Scott McKeown has identified what he believes are some instances of parties not involved in a case of patent litigation using the inter partes review (IPR) procedure to squeeze money out of patent owners who’ve won court cases but haven’t yet received a check. Since IPRs are conducted by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) you could call these operators “PTAB Trolls.” [1]http://www.ipnav.com/blog/ptab-trolls-going-after-patent-owners/ http://www.ipnav.com/blog/ptab-trolls-going-after-patent-own...
    - devit 11y ago
      If patent trolls are moving to this, it seems to be a great development for society, since it makes patent trolling itself by both NPEs and PEs less profitable or unprofitable. The legal system still seem to be broken, because it should offer a large reward to the "PTAB troll" to be paid by the patent owner so that instead of settling they would go through and invalidate the patent, while still getting money from the patent owner, who would also lose the money from the (non-)infringer.
- kanzure 11y ago
  > All of the software patent trolls are pretty much going to be out of business in the next 12 - 18 months Sounds like an opportunity to me. They might have existing licensing revenue and they are going to be wondering what to do if patent trolling ain't the name of their game anymore.
- adebtlawyer 11y ago
  > It costs millions of dollars to run these operations Are you sure? Litigation isn't always expensive if you're doing it in-house.
  - throwawaykf05 11y ago
    Or even on contingency. That is, lawyers will do this for free and take cut of the payout, if any. The good thing about this model is that nobody wants to waste resources on a fruitless lawsuit, so they will only go ahead with cars that have more merit relatively.
  - ww520 11y ago
    Lawyer fee is expensive. Discovery is expensive. Patent discovery can run from weeks to months of expert time. Those can quickly add up.
    - adebtlawyer 11y ago
      I said 'in-house.' That means lawyers on staff on salaries, not fees to outside counsel. Work costs money, sure, but I'm skeptical of 'millions of dollars.'
- mtgx 11y ago
  Seems Microsoft made the patent "deal" with Google just in time. Soon they wouldn't have had any leverage to "threaten" companies with patent lawsuits.
- WildUtah 11y ago
  "It costs millions of dollars to run these operations" It costs millions on the defense side. The plaintiffs don't have any documents to discover and the attorneys are usually the partners in the scam, so it's almost free to them. That's the whole point of trolling in East Texas: the court rules make it even more expensive to be a defendant and cheaper to be a plaintiff.
monochromatic 11y ago
This is a decision from Judge Gilstrap though, not from a jury. So it doesn't have anything to do with "educating everyone."
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  Federal judges are not created with deep and intimate practical knowledge born of experience of the ins and outs of every area of federal law; they get educated by experience like anyone else.
  - monochromatic 11y ago
    Well, sure. But this is the Eastern District of Texas, where it's a reasonable guess that the judges are pretty patent-savvy.
    - dragonwriter 11y ago
      Its EDTX, where the judges (and everyone else, including the local jury pool) have over time gotten more patent savvy, because of the propensity to file patent cases in that district. Which is kind of the point of the "educating everyone" statement, as I understand it.
      - monochromatic 11y ago
        I guess. I dunno, I just always see lots of comments about how the EDTX judges are awful/pro-patent/getting kickbacks/whatever. So the idea that, hey, they just needed to be educated by presiding over a few cases... it's odd.
        hga 11y ago
        A lot of the comments I've seen to that effect are rank bigotry (I suppose I should disclaim I myself am from flyover country, extreme SW Missouri, which is culturally part of the South, and for that matter my mother is Cajun). What's so difficult to believe about people being able to learn through experience? If any of these EDTX judges got reversed on appeal, that would have been a learning experience ^_^. And dragonwriter's understanding is correct.
Zikes 11y ago
Hopefully this means folks will have more opportunities for appeals on cases that were managed under less knowledgeable judges.

PythonicAlpha 11y ago

It should be more such judges, until the politicians got some brains. Many modern (software related) patents are bringing no advances at all, but are simply claim-pitching of corporations like in the gold-rush times.

saosebastiao 11y ago

Is it normal in other areas of the law for the plaintiff to be able to choose the (extremely favorable) district and judge for the case? Cause I can't imagine this happening in any other area of law, either civil or criminal. It just doesn't seem right, especially when the bias is so clearly observable. IANAL though...

slapshot 11y ago
Nearly all aesbestos class action litigation is filed in Oakland --- it is perceived to have a favorable jury pool and you can always find a dockworker in Oakland who may have had contact. Forum shopping is so popular that it has a name: "forum shopping."
- wclax04 11y ago
  New York too
runevault 11y ago
It certainly can happen in certain other areas of the law. Recent example: the NFL filed in new York to prevent Tom Brady from filing in MN on the whole deflategate punishment case to try and avoid Brady getting a judge who consistently rules for the player in such cases.
AnimalMuppet 11y ago
You can file in any jurisdiction in which you have legal standing to file, which means any jurisdiction in which harm has been done to you. If you patent something, and someone infringes on it, and sells the infringing device nation-wide, this means that you can pick any jurisdiction nation-wide to sue them in. Normally, you pick the one that you live in, so that you don't have to travel. But for patents, many people pick East Texas, since they're more likely to get the verdict they want there.
- larrys 11y ago
  "so that you don't have to travel." Or perhaps better actually where your attorneys are located?

stanleydrew 11y ago

Progress is slow when it comes to patent reform. Judges have a lot of control over how fast it happens, since they're really the only ones who can make binding decisions. Of course it would be great if the patent office had made better decisions in the first place, but that ship sailed long ago.

x5n1 11y ago
... and the legislature can reform all of this over night, but big money and big business won't let it. they like the safety of patents even if they are not going to war with them. same mentally as guns i guess.
- Floegipoky 11y ago
  *Systemic corruption won't let it Let's call it what it is
- cheepin 11y ago
  For most of the people I know that aren't in tech, patent reform isn't remotely on their radar. Congress isn't going to go against the money for an issue that doesn't have overwhelming popular support. Is there even a consensus on what would fix the problem? Banning software patents just covers one edge case, but there are plenty more issues in patent law. Patents in all fields clearly slow down innovation by allowing the holder to slow down or stop derivative works. The common counter to removing patents altogether is big pharmacy. I don't know how much sympathy I can have for big pharmaceuticals either with how much they get away with: even with unpatented drugs we see anti-competitive behavior with companies like Turing. Clearly the innovation is profitable enough that funding it publicly and then reaping the benefit publicly shouldn't be a problem, right? The other objection is that it promotes secrets over open innovation, but I'm not sure that is too valid either. The current status quo gags profitable utilization of research for 20 years. Surely there's an acceptable alternative.
  - throwawaykf05 11y ago
    >Patents in all fields clearly slow down innovation by allowing the holder to slow down or stop derivative works. This theory is not supported by empirical evidence. There is plenty of evidence showing how industries became more innovative with the introduction of patent protection. This theory may however apply to industries where innovation is incremental and where claim boundaries are hard to define, like software, but evidence is hard to come by and only now are we seeing some empirical studies on the matter.

iraphael 11y ago

> the patent describes (...) routine tasks that could be performed by a human. Is this a good way of defining when a patent is invalid? Isn't everything (i.e.: all computations) technically tasks that could be performed by humans alone given enough time?

adebtlawyer 11y ago
The key word is 'routine.' Patentable subject matter is supposed to be non-obvious, in other words, innovative.
- monochromatic 11y ago
  In a post-Alice world, anyway. Pre-Alice, patentable subject matter and nonobviousness were separate requirements.
  - adebtlawyer 11y ago
    I'm not familiar with Alice. As far as I know, you're right, non-obviousness is different than patentable subject matter. Sorry to elide them together like that. I never claimed to be patent lawyer.
    - monochromatic 11y ago
      Not a problem, you did just as well as the U.S. Supreme Court. (Alice is a mess in my opinion, if you couldn't tell--it mixes two requirements that were supposed to completely separate.)
protomyth 11y ago
you missed the second part: 'eDekka said its patent claims to "improve the functioning of technology," but Gilstrap ruled the claimed improvements simply weren't present. None of the eDekka claims met the standard for patenting, Gilstrap found.'
WildUtah 11y ago

TheMagicHorsey 11y ago

Software patents are pitched as a policy choice that encourages programmers by giving them some financial incentive to invent more software. That's how they have been pitched to programmers and the American people. However, after having worked in the patent industry for a few years now, I can tell you software patents are really just a mechanism to redistribute the wealth of engineers to lawyers. Period. That's the end result. Nothing more. I wish this was some sort of exaggeration. But it isn't in my opinion.

jMyles 11y ago
Sometimes, there's a comment that just so tersely and poignantly coalescences my objection to a public policy of enormous import but minuscule attention. This is one of those.
throwawaykf05 11y ago
Here's the thing: It's not us engineers who pay the lawyers. It's our employers. We don't even get a say in the matter, and over time various changes in the law have simply tipped the balance even more in favor of the employers. Your employer can file a patent on your work whether you cooperate or not. And it's not like they are going to pay us more if they stop filing patents. In fact, many firms pay a bonus if your work results in a patent (or even a patent application.) Clearly they see some value in them, and they have reasons to. And this is true of all patents, btw, not just in software.
- jaredhansen 11y ago
  >And it's not like they are going to pay us more if they stop filing patents. This is actually not true at all. The cost here isn't in the filing of the patents; it's in the nightmarish patent system that results in absurd litigation and related expenses. If the patent system were reformed to avoid this kind of expense, the company would have lower operating costs, which would be distributed in some way. While it's possible I suppose that 100% of those savings would be collected by shareholders as profit, it's much more likely that, like with anything else, the cost reductions would simply contribute to the size of the total pie, which would be split among owners and employees in proportions probably roughly similar to how it's split today.

bsimpson 11y ago

> reformed rules would have forced trolls like eDekka to actually explain how their targets infringe their patents. However, that's not currently a requirement How is it even possible to sue somebody for something you can't show that they did?

throwawaykf05 11y ago
You are supposed to prove it during the lawsuit, but you can get one filed just on "belief" and vague accusations. This stays the lawyers bills running for the defendant while the plaintiff can just wait, which is a tactic often resulting in early settlements. In the US there is something called rule 11 that prevents you from filing bad faith lawsuits, but it is a pretty low bar. IMO if this is strengthened by, say, requiring detailed claim charts up front, it can go a long way in deterring nuisance lawsuits.
monochromatic 11y ago
It's a question of how much specificity you need when you're first starting the suit. Discovery is the process in a civil lawsuit that lets you figure out exactly what happened.

throwawaykf05 11y ago

If you look past the common rhetoric against ED Texas about bring patentee-friendly and look at the data, this is not really surprising. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1597919 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1597919 ED Texas did get a bad rap for being plaintiff-friendly early on, but that didn't last long at all, as the data shows. These days it seems to be favored for being a relatively fast docket and having judges with more patent-expertise.

magicalist 11y ago
> These days it seems to be favored for being a relatively fast docket and having judges with more patent-expertise. Uh, neither of those are really true, the fast docket is especially wrong. In fact, there are a host of reasons why the Eastern District is popular (your source is wildly out of date due to changes since 2010). There's a reason that 44% of all patent cases for the first half of 2015 were filed in the district[1]. Juries do indeed rule for defendants there a decent amount of the time, but the rules tend to be very plaintiff-friendly in the sense that they make it very expensive to go to court at all, making settling seem all the more attractive (which just so happened to be the exact business plan of the article's subject, eDekka LLC :) Lots of sources linked in [1] [1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/08/deep-dive-why-we-need-venue-reform-restore-fairness-patent-litigation https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/08/deep-dive-why-we-need-...
- monochromatic 11y ago
  The fact that it has patent-savvy judges is absolutely a reason why many plaintiffs file there. Ignorant judges are unpredictable.
  - magicalist 11y ago
    But there aren't especially patent-savvy judges there when compared to many other districts, like the District of Delaware or the Eastern District of Virginia, both also very experienced as patent-litigating districts of choice.
- 11y ago

rebootthesystem 11y ago

Case after case we continue to see a pattern of apparent ignorance, incompetence or indifference on the part of the patent office. I read through the claims. This patent should not have been granted. You can go back to the 1980's and find relevant prior art. Are they playing "dumb" because of self preservation? In other words, if the patent office became really strict and only a handful of patents were granted every year they'd only need a fraction of the people, infrastructure and organization now in place. People would lose their jobs. And so, if you want to keep your job, you issue patents like we are in the middle of a new scientific renaissance. More patents means more money being pumped into the system which, in turn, means you get to keep your job, your benefits and an amazing lifetime pension you did not pay for. You know you the patents you are letting through are crap but all you care about is your financial well being. You htink "Let the courts and those rich fucks sort it out" and move on. Is it possible that the feedback loop at the patent office is such that volume, rather than quality, is what's remunerated? Never mind that this destroys innovation and causes huge financial losses across all kinds of businesses. The fitness function might be such that optimization delivers exactly what we do not want as a nation but what the patent office, as an isolated organism, needs for survival.