Slashdot Mirror
BetaNet Sues Everyone For Remote SW Activation
eldavojohn writes "Not to be out patent trolled by Eolas, a mystery company named 'BetaNet, LLC' is suing: Adobe Systems, Inc, Apple, Inc., Arial Software, LLC, Autodesk, Inc.,, CARBONITE, INC., Corel Corp., Eastman Kodak Co., International Business Machines Corp., Intuit, Inc., Microsoft Corp., McAfee, Inc., Oracle Corp., Rockwell Automation, Inc., Rosetta Stone, Inc., SAP America, Inc., Siemens Corp. and Sony Creative Software, Inc. for infringement of their patent entitled Secure system for activating personal computer software at remote locations. And of course, this was filed in our favoritest of favorite places: Marshall, TX (Texas Eastern District Court)."
Judges do not make the laws, they simply settle disputes with laws already made. It would be a gross violation of their judicial power were they to legislate from the bench ( which many attempt anyway ).
Regardless, if you want to know why this particular area houses so many of these types of disputes, follow the money. They wouldn't do it if they weren't benefiting financially somehow.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Surely at some point the judge/judges in that small corner of Texas should, if they're not idiots or in league with these trolls, realize that the reason they're getting so many patent lawsuits filed in their jurisdiction is because they're considered to be overly in favor of the people who are suing?
If I may opine my nonprofessional perspective from the software field, patents (and really the copyrighting/property concept applied to ideas in general) are a fuzzy field of law. Meaning that in most of the cases, the common sense rule doesn't work. I mean that if you approached a large number of citizens, their response could vary depending on their political direction, their previous personal experiences with companies or even how you present the case. You'll notice that I came out in this summary screaming--in a very nonprofessional way--that BetaNet is a patent troll. Makes it obvious who to side with, right? But given the letter of the law, it's not that simple. Given United States legal code, there are cases when patent litigation is the answer (in my opinion rarely if ever in software but that's another topic altogether).
Now, if you can establish that it's a hazy field and outcomes are tied to differences in regions of the United States, you can also establish that there will always be a local maximum for percentages of cases awarded one way or the other. That's why Marshall, TX is so popular for the trolls. And if Marshall, TX had a mission statement tomorrow to shut down patent trolls from the get go then the next statistic maximum would be your preferred place of patent trolling.
What disappoints me most about Eastern Texas' Courts is that they don't say, "What the hell is this doing in my courtroom? Neither of you claim offices here or even do business here so go back to where one of you operate." Sometimes this happens but really I think this needs to be done more often. In my opinion, the solution isn't to stop Marshall, TX; it's to fix the patent system.
My work here is dung.
Ahhh, but these patent trolls don't actually produce anything. They can't be violating anyone else's patents, unless a business method patent for patent trolling has been granted by the USPTO. They have nothing to lose but the time of their (presumably on-staff) lawyers. It's a speculative cash generation business for lawyers, and nothing more. They buy a few patents (or as many as they can for the capitol they raise from their investors), then turn around and sue everyone they can find. The payouts are so large that they need only hit once every few years to make a profit. There is no down side, except to come up completely empty and lose the investor's money. That's fairly unlikely when you take a shotgun approach, especially if you can hit small companies first with enough to pay back your initial investment.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
They are NOT stupid. They are corrupt. The voting positions of politicians are based almost entirely on campaign contributions, not on any moral or logical consideration. That is why I feel that modifying campaign finance laws so that you can only give money to a candidate for whom you can cast a vote would go a long ways toward cleaning up this mess. This would mean that corporations and unions and foreign individuals could no longer contribute to any candidate because those entities cannot cast a vote.