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Most Software Patent Trolls Lose Lawsuits
An anonymous reader writes "A new study is out concerning patent trolls and software patents, which found the rather surprising news that the most litigated patents tend to lose nearly 90% of the time. When broken down into different categories, patent trolls and software patents lose their lawsuits most often. While some may suggest this means 'the system is working,' that's not really true. The data suggests that most companies, when threatened with a lawsuit, end up settling or licensing to avoid the high costs of litigating. But the fact that so few software patents and patent trolls do well at trial may be more incentive to fight back. Either way, what does seem pretty obvious is that all those ridiculous patents you see in patent lawsuits are, in fact, bad patents."
I bet a lot of patent trolls don't have much money in the bank.
Acacia does a lot of troll suits under other names: IP Innovations, Acacia Technologies, or Acacia Media Technologies, among others.
I wonder if this is a way to protect Acacia from having the pay the losses. Maybe when they lose, they just tear up the piece of paper on which that legal entity existed. ...and make two more.
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So isnt this just a case of the need for general tort reform ? It's not only patents that suffer from this kind of thing. Everything from liability lawsuits for slip and falls, to frivolous medical malpractice lawsuits burden the justice system and drive all costs up. It's rather narrow to focus on patents alone, when its a much wider problem.
I don't know that I have an immediate alternative this evening (though I might and just can't remember it ;-) ), but I think societies reflect in a self-similar way the way the rules and agreements that describe them were fashioned.
In other words, were a small group of people, no matter how gifted and altruistic, to create a framework for others to follow without participation and consent of those others during the framing itself, then eventually the society will come to reflect that inequity of that process. The society will just become a larger, longer-term analog of the seed that created it.
This is what we see in the U.S. today.
There are moments of exquisite beauty in the founding documents of the U.S. But because the system itself was developed - of necessity, mind you - in a procedurally inequitable way, the resulting state also reflects that inequity.
It's a function of consciousness, really. Consciousness is self-similar (like fractals and holograms), so the pieces reflect the whole. If the first piece is inequitable (even if that's simply the inequity of participation in its creation), then the whole will be as well.
So whatever follows after Law (which is simply the collective-scale version of how a parent needs to be when a child is roughly two, the structure necessary to hold the developing consciousness until it can hold itself. It was absolutely essential thousands of years ago, but humanity as a whole has developed beyond that stage now) will of necessity be something we create together.
And in order to create something together, we first need to realize and accept that's what we're doing. And to do even that we'll need to be brave enough to leave some of the past behind. Then we can agree to work together to create something - anything.
I'd even go so far as to suggest that anything we create together, no matter how immature in comparison to what we have now, will still in the long run be better for us all.
If you look at the real linguistic roots of the word anarchy, it means, not "no law", but "no rulers" - In essence, phrases such as "government by laws and not men" describe a form of anarchy. Having one group that is much less than the whole of the populace frame the laws, and be relatively immune from their penalties, is one, mostly inferior, option among some quite more acceptable alternatives.
Supposedly, the Incans had a legal system where the penalties for acts grew if the person found guilty was more highly placed in society. A farmer charged with public drunkenness paid a small fine, a craftsman a larger one, a merchant might face lashing, and a politician execution. (I say 'supposedly' because there is some real dispute in archaeological circles over just what the Inca society was like, whether there are traces of it we can infer from the later Mayans, and such - maybe it was but a brief moment before the Incans lost such a system to rising corruption, or there were still some privileged people who were immune, or maybe they really made it work for many generations).
Could any modern society develop a system like that? It seems hard enough to move things towards more equal treatments - just look at how difficult it has been in the US to get the idea even considered seriously that Congress members 'public service' should entitle them to a retirement program and medical assistance no better than what Social Security and Medicare provide to the general public. Making the penalties harsher for screwing up the higher you go is very far from the way things are usually done.
Who is John Cabal?