Losing the War on Patents

theodp writes: "Jeff Bezos and Tim O'Reilly's once-hyped BountyQuest.com takes a beating in a Salon article today that takes note of Amazon's recent decision to license one of the few patents BountyQuest claimed to have found winning prior art for, a patent held by the InTouch Group, who had sued Amazon for infringing on the patent prior to Bezos' reported $1+ million BountyQuest investment. In the article, professional patent buster Greg Aharonian provocatively remarks that "BountyQuest was always a joke...Bezos and O'Reilly were never seriously interested in patent quality...Bezos just used O'Reilly to help Amazon...That Amazon ended up licensing the InTouch patent just shows how stupid the whole thing is.""

Comments

New Idea

[Tremul]

Next thing you know, somebody will try and patent the hyperlink. Oh wait...

Licensure does not Mean What You Might Think

[euphline]

Amazon.com's decision to license a patent simply means that they did a little bit of math to determine whether the cost to litigate the patent suit, combined with the odds of winning were greater or less than the cost of licensing the patent. Clearly, they determined that it was simply cheaper to license the patent than to litigate it.

The legal system in the United States is (unfortunately) often used by unscrupulous companies that know that settling their lawsuit will be cheaper than litigation... regardless of the merits of the case.

That said, settling lawsuits (also known as ADR, Alternative Dispute Resolution) is a *good thing*. This gets the decision making out of the hands of judges and juries and into the hands of the parties. It allows folks that are at odds to come together on something where they both have *some shot* of going home happy. At the end of a lawsuit, often everyone loses because of the high cost of litigation.

-jbn

Please note: Part of the cost of litigation is lawyers. They are just doing their job. Part of the cost of technology is hiring techies. Don't fault lawyers for getting paid any more than you fault yourself for getting paid.

Re:Licensure does not Mean What You Might Think

[SirSlud]

> settling lawsuits (also known as ADR, Alternative Dispute Resolution) is a *good thing*

No it's not. It only means that trying to do the right thing (that is, figure out who really owns a patent and whether or not its valid) is more expensive than paying wallet-service to unsubstantiated claims.

If thats the pinnacle of achievement of the market based economy, count me out. Like how the IMF bailed everyone out of the Asian market crisis, nobody ends up learning anything, and stupidity is allowed to reign. Market based tactics always place the interests of the few (private interests, natch), above those of a soceity at large, which is why in this day of wealth-stroking penetance, the social costs of systems supporting private interests are huge. So long as you blindly stroke the market with your narrow minded rhetoric, it will continue to do so, instead of serving the broader social interests (ie, barrier to market, equality in market participation) that it was designed to do.

Money talks louder than Right. If you claim thats a good thing, you're too far gone to save.

Waste of an investment

[The Rizz]

Amazon may have just gone with the option of paying InQuest because it might just be cheaper to pay the patent royalties than deal with a lengthy court case.
Even if they do have prior art on their side, you have to PROVE it's prior art.

The stupid thing here is that Bezos spent $1M+ on this project and didn't even bother doing anything with the fruits of the labor.

Oh well, hopefully BountyQuest is at least paying those who find the prior art... that way it can be useful for someone, if only as a way to redirect some corporate money into one's own pockets. (In the non-Enron way, that is...)

--The Rizz

"There are no circumstances under which a state is justified in placing its welfare ahead of mine." --Robert A. Heinlein

Unusable legally?

[interiot]

Speaking of the BountyQuest prior art discovery:

• "It was never used in the case," says Joshua Kaplan, founder of InTouch. "The defendants didn't bring it up."

Simple answer: it wasn't viable as legal evidence in a court of law?

Let's strike back...

[DocSnyder]

Patent-No. 3.14159265

Method to increase the choice on a public online opinion poll

Reference A shows an apparatus to perform a public online opinion poll (Reference B) which is to be increased by one option (Reference C) containing the nickname of a person related to the mentioned apparatus (Reference D)...

References:

A) "http://slashdot.org/"
B) "http://slashdot.org/pollBooth.pl"
C) "http://slashdot.org/pollBooth.pl?qid=740"
D) "http://cowboyneal.org/"

I guess we know how Native Americans felt...

[ArcSecond]

Imagine you are living next to a river, enjoying the fishing, the transportation, the community that has grown up around life on the river.

Then some @sshole finds a nugget of gold. Suddenly there's a town upstream, polluting the river, 1000s of stinky (and paranoid) prospectors pointing shotguns ("git awfa mah propertah!"), and the river is clogged with boats.

We can only hope that the gold runs dry quickly, the prospectors drown trying to run the rapids on their way to sell their sacks of gold (which they tend to tie to their bodies, thankfully), and things will get back to normal sooner or later.

Either that, or its time to move.

If It's broke don't fix it!

[Gopher971]

The US Government seems to have a very blinkered approach to patent reform. Blindfolded in fact.
However some of the cures seem worse than the disease. For Example:

Others are calling for more radical government reform. Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, argues Congress should exclude software from the patent system. "That," he says, "would really solve the problem."

or

"One reform is to require applicants to do prior art searches, as opposed to the current rule that they disclose what they know," he says. "The current rule allows them to wimp out by saying, 'We didn't know because we didn't search.'"

They do not tackle the underlying problem. The Patents system was never designed for software and code. Patent legislation and practice law has been distorted to accomodate them and this has led to "bad" patents.

If this can be resolved is up to FTC but going on past experience I wouldn't expect too much progress.

Making the US vulnerable to economic warfare?

[Ice Tiger]

Looking at the US patent system and DMCA, it seems that maybe the US is vulnerable to econmic warfare from entities external to it's borders.

By tactical use of patents and copyright laws it would be easy for such an entity to stifle development of technology and products, thus destroying the US economy.

Just an idea.

Re:Making the US vulnerable to economic warfare?

[Bozar]

Most likely not: for the simple reason that the united states legal system has a habit of ruling in favor of US residents (of which, big corporations are the most important ;D) Take for instance the patent on radio communication by marconi(an italian), which was overturned in favor of one of tesla's (an american). And this comes after marconi won the nobel prize for inventing the radio. (not that tesla didn't deserve to win the dispute... but he was dead at the time i think) And in any case, any money that you put into disputing a patent goes into the united states legal community and legal system, so you are making your own worst nightmare: a nation of practicing lawyers. (wait... do we have that already? :( )

What can we honestly do?

[JohnDenver]

20,000 software patents a year...

That really bothers me. As a software developer, I've always aspired to make some really cool killer application, but I wonder how many infringments of obvious patents I would encounter if I attempted to do so.

So what am I going to do? Drive down to DC and hold up posters and distribute leaflets in front of the USPTO while the people who are taking advantage of the patent office laugh at me as they work on receiving thier government sanctioned monopoly on an IDEA???

Wait a minute... I thought we were capitalists. What's this crap about the government sanctioning monopolies? On ideas non-the-less.

I don't know about you guys, but I feel helpless in this situation. I grew up actually believing that this civilization was about real prosperiety and the creation of wealth.

I had one idea. I figured that with 20,000 some patents a year, we could assemble them and demonstrate how easy it is to infringe on obvious patents.

The way I would probably demonstrate this would be by writing a VB program in front of a group of people, much like the seminars. As I add features, I would tally the number of patents I infringed on.

Hell, you don't even have to show any code, just the natural evolution of ideas. Maybe as you're improving the software you could poll the audience for the next improvement and to thier surprise, they would discover thier obvious solution had been patented.

That's one idea, but it's fill with a ton of flaws. Ex: Who wants to watch me improve on a software program? Where am I going to do that? How am I even going to get people there?

I don't know about you guys, but I want to stop bitching about this and do something. The question is: What can I honestly do?

Re:What can we honestly do?

[Shiny Metal S.]

Wait a minute... I thought we were capitalists. What's this crap about the government sanctioning monopolies? On ideas non-the-less.

I don't know about you guys, but I feel helpless in this situation. I grew up actually believing that this civilization was about real prosperiety and the creation of wealth.

These are words of Thomas Jefferson, the primary author of the United States Declaration of Independence:

"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property."

When did the strong spirit of these beautiful ideas become so meaningless?

Re:What can we honestly do?

[Shiny Metal S.]

Please, do not confuse copyright and patent system. They have very little in common. I know why were the patent laws introduced. I'm asking about the spirit of such great people like Thomas Jefferson, not what is the patent system for.

So the government setup this thing where they will protect your idea for x years so you can make money off it, and in exchange, you give your idea to the world. Everyone wins.

This is very important to understand: When someone gets a patent for obvious invention - only this one person wins, while the rest of the world loses. It is especially true with software patents, where I can write a program and distribute it to millions of people with zero cost. The license fee is no longer a small percentage of my investment. It's the only cost, which absolutely stops development of free software.

Sure, you can get rid of copyright and force people to give their ideas up, but other countries have tried this, and the result is no one makes up new ideas.

Could you provide any examples to illustrate your point?

Software patents

[alcibiades]

There are some problems with the way patents are examined in the US, but the fact is that US patents are of higher quality (and hence more valuable) than patents anywhere else in the world. This is due in large part to the effectiveness of the examination system.

Software patents are not examined as effectively as other types of patents, e.g., for hardware or mechanical devices, in large part because of the natural language problem; when I claim software, I am claiming an algorithm that can be described in hundreds of different ways in English, even though to one of ordinary skill in the art all of those descriptions would mean the same thing. Add to that the fact that the technology is developing so quickly that nobody in the industry is aware of all the latest developments, and you have a serious information distribution problem -- examiners don't have access to the prior art.

The answer is not to overthrow a system that has helped to make the US a global leader in technology development. In fact, few, if any, changes need to be made to the system at all. As the software industry develops, the fundamental concepts that form the basis for technology in the industry will become better and more widely understood, and fewer "obvious" patents (like the "one click" patent) will issue. In the mean time, we have to look carefully at what is being claimed in these patents to see how the industry develops a legal description for its fundamental concepts.

Software patents in the end will protect small companies that come up with "killer apps" rather than allowing large companies to perpetuate monopolies that are founded on their dominating share of the market. The patent system has done this again and again in other fields, and software will be no different.

The main problem with software patent

[Nicolas MONNET]

Setting aside problems of obviousness, the difficulty of evaluating it, the problem of prior art etc.

It costs lots of money to mass-produce a technically advanced enough device that would infringe on a significant patent. This means that, if you are faced with a patent infrigement suit, you are most likely already spending a lot of money to produce/design the device, so defending yourself will only be a small part of the total cost of the thing.

Software patents now ... just ANY programmer could infringe on patents. That means that an 18 year old student could be found infringing a patent, for something he's not even making money on, and then he could not even afford a lawyer to defend himself!

And it's virtually IMPOSSIBLE to avoid infriging on patents: not only are there too many of those patents, but they're written in a completely hermetic language that only specialists comprehend. To top it off, not every programmer understands english well enough to begin with.

That's why software patents are dangerous and freak the shit out of free software developers: it's like running in a landmine-ridden field. Nobody has step on one yet, but it's bound to happen.

Goes to show, you can't be too cynical

[Rogerborg]

• That Amazon ended up licensing the InTouch patent just shows how stupid the whole thing is

Which demonstrates the clarity of corporate thinking in contrast to our muddy old fashioned notions of "right" and "wrong". From my experiences of talking to my employer's legal department, here's how corporates involved in litigation think:

• How much will I have to pay if I choose to to win this suit?
• How much will I have to pay if I don't choose to win this suit?

That's it. That's the only consideration. If the cost of paying lawyers to win the case is more than the cost of paying the litigant, it won't be fought, and no precedent will be set. Right and wrong is irrelevant. Note that in a case where both parties have limited access to resources, it really is the ability and willingness to spend that decides the verdict. When one party runs out of money or blinks, the case is settled.

A step towards helping this would be if the courts took an example from (e.g.) English courts, where it's much more usual for the loser to pay both sides' legal costs. This generally requires a countersuit in the US, except in a few well defined cases, like when you can prove breach of registered copyright (yes, that's right, if someone steals your unregistered copyrighted work, you have to pay to prove they did it, then all that happens is that a court tells them to stop [and if they don't, you have to bring another suit]. You don't typically get a sizable award, not even your legal costs).

Second, courts could stop awarding randomly huge amounts of damages to successful litigants. As with unregistered copyright, they could simply say "Stop it" to the losing party, and let both sides pay their lawyers and weep over how stupid they were to let it get to court in the first place. There's an argument that punishing the transgressor is necessary to make an example, but we have swung too far, to the point where people are using the courts as a primary means of income (not just at a corporate level over patents and IP, some people make a good living through personal injury suits)

Third (an important adjuct) we could trim the crap out of our legal system and translate it from Lawyerese. It's no coincidence that about 50% of both Senate and Congress are members of the American Bar Association. Separation of powers my ass, US law is written by lawyers for lawyers. What we need is a system where neither defendant or litigant needs a lawyer, and a streamlined process that forces both parties to stick to the primary evidence by giving a fixed amount of time to present whatever evidence and arguments they want (without interruption), then a fixed time to rebutt their opponents. This often happens in an ad hoc fashion in lower courts dealing with minor issues, but there is no reason why it shouldn't apply at all levels of civil litigation which considers "balance of probability" rather than "beyond all resonable doubt". If you can't make your case in two hours (without interruption), you can't make it at all and are just stalling to bleed your opponent and to inflate the perceived important of your arguments relative to his.

Whew. There we are. I firmly believe that patents aren't the problem. Sure, it's farcical that the USPTO is funded through granting patents, but I don't believe that's the real problem. The problem is that it costs a lot of money to defend a patent suit, and we give ludicruous awards to the winner based on theoretical damages. Chances are that the defendant has more to lose and will blink first and settle. As we've seen again and again, we now have a new breed of company that exists solely to file speculative patents, sit tight until someone else implements them, then sue on the basis that they could have made X amount of money if they'd bothered to implement their own idea.

Simple enough answer: you didn't implement the idea, you don't get damages. You can stop people from using your idea, and you can negotiate to license or sell it, but what you can't do is negotiate using the threat of an insanely huge lawsuit. If you want to stop OmniMegaCorp from using your idea, find a pro bono lawyer, sue, win, get your legal costs awarded, and let them come to you offering to pay you a fair amount. If the implementor thinks they've got prior art, they have less to lose by fighting it to the end, and having your patent invalidated. We really do need to encourage both sides to see a case through to the end by lowering the risks, and I'd be willing to put tax dollars into the courts to make that happen, because I know that every time a company buckles under and agrees to license an idiotic patent, those costs will eventually be passed on to me.

Does that sound insane?

Re:Goes to show, you can't be too cynical

[ajakk]

A step towards helping this would be if the courts took an example from (e.g.) English courts, where it's much more usual for the loser to pay both sides' legal costs.

After starting off with a good explanation of why people settle, you offer a solution which just makes it worse. If the loser has to pay the other's attorney's fees, then people will settle even sooner because the amount of money they could lose is significantly higher. Example: lets say that example company R sues other company I for patent infringement. R sues I for $10 million dollars. I knows that the patent is silly. If they fight the patent, they will have to spend $2 million for lawyers (as will their opponents). Now if I wins, they will lose nothing, but if they lose the case, they will have to pay $14 million ($10mil judgement + 2 mil. lawyers + 2 mil. other lawyers). This sort of distribution of costs makes it harder for companies to know how much a lawsuit will cost, and most companies being risk adverse, they will settle to avoid the lawsuit. Simple enough answer: you didn't implement the idea, you don't get damages. You can stop people from using your idea, and you can negotiate to license or sell it, but what you can't do is negotiate using the threat of an insanely huge lawsuit.

Mostly I agree with this. What happens if you were working on implementing an idea, but someone else comes out and uses your patent, and they destroy your market. Ie. you have a patent on a widget. Joe Bob reads your patent and starts selling the widgets, and everyone who wants a widget has already bought one. Now you sue Joe Bob, and he can't sell them any more. What are you going to do with your $30 million dollar widget factory?

Re:Goes to show, you can't be too cynical

[Jahf]

In my mind, the system that would work best is:

a) Plaintiff wins, legal fees covered by individual parties since the Plaintiff was shown to be "in the right".

b) Defendendant wins, all legal fees are covered by the plaintiff since they were responsible for bringing the suit to court and wasting everyone's time and money.

That way the defendant, who did not call the court to action, never has to pay for the often exorbitant plaintiff's legal fees. Additionally, plaintiffs have an incentive to only bring to trial issues that they are "in the right" on.

We'd still have problems, but far fewer lawsuits would be brought on just to threaten someone into submission.

Re:Goes to show, you can't be too cynical

[Animats]

Sure, it's farcical that the USPTO is funded through granting patents....

That's a good point. Maybe the issue fee ($1280) should be folded into the filing fee ($740).

Re:Lawyers are all evil bastards

[ichimunki]

Market economy? Lawyers are a guild whose practice it is illegal to perform without joining the guild. That's an artificially restricted supply, hence not a free market. Try again.

Who gets to define *common sense ideas* ?

[ip_vjl]

You can't say that the patent office shouldn't grant patents on common sense ideas. The only way a patent examiner can show that something was *common* is by finding relevant prior art. If the idea has existed, THEN the examiner can deem it as common sense because somebody talked/wrote about it before.

A patent examiner doesn't have the luxury of just saying, "oh, well this is obvious." If it was so obvious, then why is there NO prior art mentioning it in the past?

Let's face it, as computer geeks, we think just about any computer idea is obvious because it all builds from prior knowledge. But to the patent office, they can't be so subjective. They need to guage the public's knowledge NOT by what they THINK the public knows ... but by what the public has shown it knows through prior art references.

If something is truly common knowledge, then some reference to it must exist somewhere. That's the problem that places like IP.com are trying to solve. Make prior art more easily visible to examiners to prevent these "bad" patents from issuing.

- vin

Re:Who gets to define *common sense ideas* ?

[Catiline]

They need to guage the public's knowledge NOT by what they THINK the public knows ... but by what the public has shown it knows through prior art references.

I feel really bad smashing your beautiful argument to little bits, but you made a critical error. The "common sense" in question isn't of Joe Public, but of specialists. I don't have to be a nuclear physicist, but I expect that if one came up with a brilliant new idea- say, cold fusion- and it worked, that they could go to the patent office and get a patent. OTOH, I don't want folks going and getting a patent on (for example) putting your socks on before your shoes.

The problem here is that the PTO has delegated the lion's share of research into prior art to the applicant. How many people do you think, under that system, would do research? Either the PTO has to do independent research, or would also have to say "We will invalidate any patent granted if we are notified of prior art, no matter how minor, relevant to your patent that was not mentioned in the application."

Prior art intentionally buried?

[r2ravens]

From the article:
" ...anyone smart enough to figure out how to find the prior art will know enough about the industry to go straight to the players -- law firms, companies -- and sell the prior art directly, cutting out the BountyQuest middlemen."

So, let me see if I understand this. It is possible that if one discovers prior art, one could contact law firms and companies directly to sell this knowledge? One might even contact the company which is the patent-holder in question to see what it would be worth to keep this information a secret, or sell the information to the patent-holder themselves so that they may bury it.

This sounds like quite the little cottage industry and much like the many designs for 100+ mpg carburetors which have been purchased by the car companies and shelved.

I know that it is possible that some other person may find information regarding the same prior art, but the gamble might be worth it from the companies perspective based on how many or how few people might be looking at a particular patent and the value of that patent.

It wouldn't surprise me that this is taking place. Another possible example of capitalism at it's finest.

I guess greed may still rule...

Re:Prior art intentionally buried?

[bmajik]

Do you have any non-men-in-black links to back up the "100 mpg" carburetor ?

a) fuel injection has been more fuel efficient than carburettion since like, 1980

b) many vehicles are hit with a gas-guzzler tax because they dont meet some fuel efficiency standard. that cost is directly passed to consumers, meaning a higher price point for a given car, meaning less attractiveness compared to some other vehicle which is more fuel efficient

c) things like CAFE and other clean air / efficient fuel laws penalize automakers that dont meet draconian fuel efficiency standards.

in other words, fuel efficiency is a _major_ cost issue for car makers. the prices of the cars go up if they aren't fuel efficient, and the carmakers actually get fines if they dont ship cars in a certain range of efficiencies... to the extent that some foreign cars will never come to us shores because of the pentaly imposed..

for example, BMW just designed and built a brand new engine factory because they figured out how to get approx 15% fuel economy improvement. This is a major leap forward in engine design. All future BMW engines will incorporate this technology (valvetronic)

So, tell me who's sitting on a 100mpg _carburettor_ that actually works, and is a relevant choice for application in a US motor vehicle ? Because i'd be curious to see what mathematics comes up with a scenario where sitting on it is better than putting it in a car...

Prior art is only part of the solution.

[MongooseCN]

You also have to have the time and money to defend your prior art in court. Say you invented and patented an algorithm for some form of super video compression years ago. Now if Microsoft decided today to use that algorithm in their product, would you try to take MS to court? Do you think your average programmer is going to have the time and money to defend his patent against a large corporations armada of lawyers hired specifically for the purpose of creating and defending patents? No, just finding prior art doesn't mean anything if you can't defend it.

Sig recursion

[MarkusQ]

Just you're average nitpicker.

Uh, shouldn't that be "Just your average nitpicker."?

-- MarkusQ

The Purpose of Patents

[TomRC]

The only purpose for existence of the patent system is to encourage the invention of novel inventions and methods and publish them to make them available for the use of the nation.

Ask yourself: was there a lack of innovation before software became patentable? Has innovation in software increased since software became patentable?

Are software inventions more or less available for use once they are patented?

Corporate patent lawyers actually DISCOURAGE engineers from seeking solutions to technical problems in the patent system - it would open the corporation up for patent law suits. It's much safer to re-invent the wheel.

Hurt to developing economies

[pubjames]

The way patents are used these days is unfair and is really going to hurt developing economies.

I wonder if Japan's economic revolution, which started because it began copying electronics devices from the West and did them more cheaply, then better, I wonder if that could today? They would probably get hit by loads of patent infringement claims, which they wouldn't have been able to afford to fight.

Lets take India, for instance. Lots and lots of very cheap programmers. Don't like paying hundreds of dollars for your XYZ software? You don't have to any more, the Indians have a package just as good for a tenth of the price... It could happen, just liked it happened with Asian countries and consumer electronics and cars.

Some of you may think, well in that case software patents are good because they protect American businesses. However, if the ecomonies of developing countries improve, we are all better off for it. The people in those countries are more wealthy, which is better for them, and it's better for us because they have money to buy our stuff. Essentially, patents are blocking the efficient working of the free economy, which of course is a cornerstone to the American Way. So, to use currently popular rhetoric, software patents are anti-America.

Re:Hurt to developing economies

[Lonath]

They're not going to allow software patents. The rest of the world just flat out won't respect patents and they will continue to make new software and only the 5 percent of the world's population in the US will get dragged down by them. Think about the long term implications of this:

You can write any software you want for 95 percent of the world's population (a vastly untapped market) or you can run through a minefield of regulations to write software for the 5 percent of the world with a very mature market. I see the rest of the world opting out of the US IP system.

100mpg (was Re:Prior art intentionally buried?)

[MoNsTeR]

It's worth pointing out that the 100mpg carbeurator did actually "exist" on paper, but that it "worked" by ignoring the laws of physics. That is to say, it /didn't/ work, reducing the myth of the greedy auto companies stifling fuel economy to just that, a myth.

Get your Google on if you want confirmation.

Here's another way to balance things

[A nonymous Coward]

Prohibit either party from spending more than the other. If MegaCorp sues TeensyCorp, they can't bring ten lawyers to the negotiating table or courtroom unless TeensyCorp also brings ten lawyers. If TeensyCorp wants to spend $1000 total on their defense, that's all MegaCorp can spend. Perhaps MegaCorp is absolutely positively sure that they will win on merit; allow them to loan TeensyCorp as much as they want, but TeensyCorp has the right to refuse the loan, in which case MegaCorp still is limited by what TeensyCorp spends. If TeensyCorp accepts the loan and loses, they owe the loan amount; if TeensyCorp wins, MegaCorp loses the loan in addition to the judgement.

In other words, get money out of the equation of justice. There would certainly be some abuses. MegaCorp could pay a low rate for legal advice on one lawsuit and exagerated rates on unrelated legal matters. But that would show up sooner or later, and it could only be done to a limited extent. MegaCorp still couldn't show up in court with ten lawyers who are only billing $25 an hour, it would be too fishy.

Apply this to all cases, not just civil. It would stop the death penalty abuses, where some poor slob (who probably is also a scumbag, but still deserves justice) is given $350 for his complete defense.

obviously...

[Dr. Awktagon]

BountyQuest was always a joke...Bezos and O'Reilly were never seriously interested in patent quality...

If you're at Vegas and you find a broken slot machine that pays out more than 50% of the time, would you tell anybody? Would you do anything about it? Why on earth would you?

You'd just get in line along with the hundreds of other people and start pulling that lever..