Slashdot Mirror
Judge Makes Lawyers Pay For Frivolous Patent Suit
Gallenod writes "The Denver Post is reporting that the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld the decision of a Federal judge who threw out and reversed a jury decision in favor of a patent infringement claim and ordered the plaintiff's lawyers to pay the defendants' court costs. U.S. District Senior Judge Richard P. Matsch sanctioned the plaintiff's attorneys for 'cavalier and abusive' misconduct and for having a 'what can I get away with?' attitude during a 13-day patent infringement trial in Denver. With the Appeals Court in agreement, could this case be the 'shot heard round the world' in the revolution against patent trolls?"
However this guy has done some cool things, like halting clean dvd edits, he was involved in the McViegh trail and even the Kobe Bryant trial among other things .
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask where they're goin' and hook up with 'em later.
The exact opposite is what happened here; a bunch of slick, highly paid lawyers smooth-talked the jury, and then the judge tossed the jury verdict and stuck the plaintiff with the costs for their litigation.
This kind of thing is most common when the lawyers get out of control...If the judge decides that the lawyers are running amok, they can throw the whole thing out and charge them with contempt or whatever. There is some precedent in also tossing cases where the juries decision contravenes the material facts of the case, but that's a much greyer area, though it has been upheld more often than not.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
It's significant because typically the lawyers aren't the ones paying the opposing team's costs. Usually, the lawyers always win every trial, because they get paid no matter what. If you punish the lawyers themselves for going ahead with cases they know are frivolous, then you'll start to see far, far fewer lawyers taking frivolous cases.
For example, I like the Matrix trilogy, but there is a completely unnecessary sex scene in the second movie. Is it your intent to force all who would wish to watch the movie to view that scene? Even "fast forwarding" still gives you glimpses, interrupts the flow of the movie, and requires either good timing or a quick backtrack-rewind to resume the movie after the scene. This sort of things is one of the things that I wanted the Blu-ray and HD-DVDs to provide. Basically the content would still be there, but people that didn't want to view it could change a setting and those things would be skipped. Kind of like a V-Chip, but far less likely to make mistakes. Bonus points if there were a way for individuals to create their own cut points to avoid things they're uncomfortable with. I've got a few things myself that I don't want to see in movies.
It really does seem like a fair compromise, people that don't want to view the material would have an easy way of avoiding it, and the people that do could do so. It would also make it quite a bit easier to separate out the "please, won't somebody, think of the children" crowd from the people that just don't want their own kids watching it.
If they really wanted to buff up the bottom line, they could probably make a feature which would do the opposite, skip all the wholesome stuff and get straight to the T&A and B&G.