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Why Juries Have No Place In the Patent System
New submitter Isara writes "GigaOm's Jeff John Roberts has a compelling writeup about patent trials and how juries are detrimental to justice in such cases. Roberts uses the recent Apple-Samsung trial as the backdrop for his article; although the trial lasted three weeks, during which hundreds of documents were presented and the finer points of U.S. patent law were discussed, the jury only took 2-3 days to deliberate. 'Patents are as complex as other industrial policies like subsidies or regulatory regimes. When disputes arise, they should be put before an expert tribunal rather than a jury that is easily swayed by schoolyard "copycat" narratives.'"
we could start debating the patent system instead of patents themselves. There is a lot of talk about the validity of these patent lawsuits and not enough about the validity of the system itself.
We should either
1) Gut the patent system, releasing all patents into the public space or
2) Move patents to a 5-10 year maximum life before they are turned over to the public
Innovation is key, but innovation doesn't necessarily mean figuring it out on your own. Too many companies have strangleholds on great technology and methods, and the not being able to access that information only hurts those trying to compete and become viable. The idea that you can patent things as silly as a lot of what comes through in the IT world (rounded corners, click to buy, slide to unlock, etc) is stifling not only competition, but entrepreneurs, students, and people who could take it and do something better.
If your company has to bank on a patent to remain profitable, then you probably don't deserve to continue to be a company - part of being the leader is being able to continue and innovate in a space without worrying that your competitor might know how you're doing X because you're already focusing your efforts and resources on developing Y instead.
I don't really like the idea of replacing trial-by-jury as the ultimate arbiter, and in any case it would be difficult to get such a thing passed. A more incremental reform, easily doable within current constitutional law, would be to give the USPTO approval process more teeth so fewer bad patents get issued in the first place, and therefore trial never becomes a possibility. It shouldn't approve any old stuff that comes its way, but should really take the non-obviousness and novelty tests seriously.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.
- Amendment VII, The Constitution of the United States of America
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
And according to Steve Jobs Apple 'unashamedly' copies others, but will get in a hissy fit if anyone else does it to them.
"Allow any patent that is submitted into public domain, to be filed free of charge."
***
Let's be honest, most ideas are not conceived of in some big corporate lab. Most are conceived in the minds of individuals long before. Often the best ideas are conceived when an idea person is unemployed - a time when they're even harder pressed to find the $1K-$5K to file a patent.
Those individuals, usually do not have the resources to get their ideas off the ground very quickly. They might start, but then they find by the time they're working toward their goal. A big corp with lots of $$$ for lots of developers releases something similar. Worse, now they own the patent on it. The individual now can't even continue their own idea.
Happens all the time.
Courts in the Netherlands, the UK, and Korea found that Samsung devices were not in violation of Apple's designs. So, whether or not Samsung copied appears to depend on where you live.
All the experts for a given technology already work for industry. Finding independent experts that are affordable and want to work on a tribunal would be a challenge.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
So you're saying the jury should have been full of multi-billion dollar corporations? I suppose that would make sense if corporations were legally people too...
The problem is, that the jury admitted to skipping entire parts of the case and just awarding apple money. Not just that, but some features that apple has patented were not even apple innovations. So whether Samsung did copy or not, Apple was awarded money for things it copied. It isn't the fact that people are pro Samsung or pro Apple, it is that Apple was awarded a giant sum of money due to a broken system and an uneducated jury when it comes to patents.
Samsung copied the same capabilities that Apple copied and put into their products.
There's a difference.
Apple copied the rectangle with rounded corners from 3000+ year old clay styluses.
Apple copied the finger swipe, pinch resize and other touch screen capabilities from other manufacturers.
Sure they put them together in a way many hadn't seen, but that doesn't make them original, that just makes them smart.
Problem is, there are a lot of smart people in the world that can put them together as well.
There's nothing original in any of Apple's products - just different packaging that can be lied about on patent applications using words like "on a tablet" or "on a phone" - these are shams, false patents - using others IP to try and bolster an otherwise failing company. (yes Apple is failing - it wouldn't be suing like it is if it wasn't).
If the parts were switched in this trial, Apple would leave not paying a dime, it is an American court defending an American company with American juries versus an Asian company !
Why is it that every other country where this case was brought to court denied apple's claims?
$12 billion in market capitalization loss says Samsung shareholders and the market agree with you and the jury.
Is that how you think the market works?
Aha, so ignorance breeds just conclusions. I guess creationism must be true after all.
I would respectfully disagree and say that no, the jury didn't "see it." They blindly rubber-stamped the samsung line in efforts to expedite the amount of time they'd have to dedicate to the trial.
Have you seen a Samsung Epic 4g? Look at it..the only thing that you might be able to say is similar is the grid of icons, and there is significant amount of prior art of a grid of icons, to start with, palm. There is no way anyone could truthfully claim that phone flagrantly copies the iphone, even some 90 year old grandma.
http://reviews.cnet.com/smartphones/samsung-epic-4g-review/
After the verdict, I think everyone was thinking "wow..what did the jury see that I don't?" But after the jurors and foreman started talking, its apparent they did not do their duty. I'm not talking about the final verdict. I'm talking about how they decided they could just rubber-stamp every device.
It's like a student blindly answering multiple choice questions..it's apparent they weren't even reading the question when the same question is answered differently on separate occasions. In this case, they award damages for a device that they previously answer "does not infringe", and find some obviously non-infringing device to be infringing.
by patent-troll-industry-friendly political appointees, a la the SEC, FCC, etc. Although the current system of relying on lay people seems seriously flawed.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
The jury saw that, and decided that that was wrong.
And therein lies the problem. The point of a trial is to decide what is LEGAL. It's great when Right and Wrong correspond to Legal and Illegal, but it doesn't always work out that way. One reason it doesn't is because right vs. wrong can be very subjective, but legal vs. illegal is supposed to be very objective.
I'm concerned that this jury simply got offended that "Samsung copied Apple", and didn't fully consider the prior art that would make such copying perfectly legal. The foreman saying they wanted to "send a message", in clear violation of the judge's instructions, calls the result into question.
The key sequence to access my Slashdot bookmark in Firefox is Alt-B-S. I don't believe this is a coincidence.
The problems with trial by jury in civil cases go far beyond the specifics of patent law. Patent cases aren't the only ones that rely upon complicated technical and/or legal issues. With criminal trials, we accept that even if juries might not always be as competent as judges, we want them as a safeguard so that the government can't throw people in jail without a representative part of the community saying so. But in civil trials, it's not about the state versus the individual; the issue is whether private party A has to pay money to private party B. Why not have these cases handled by judges, preferably trained in the specific fields at issue? Let's also consider the plight of the jurors: not everyone can easily miss work for long periods of time, and many companies don't pay for jury duty. Again, civic duty might be a plausible justification for doing this for criminal trials, but is it really right to pull private citizens out of their normal lives for months on end to hear a random business dispute between 2 companies?
It's worth pointing out that the jury's role has already been significantly weakened in civil cases. It is not uncommon for judges to order the jury to return a verdict for one particular side in a civil case. (In criminal trials, the judge can order a directed verdict for the defense, but not for the prosecution.) It's also not uncommon for a jury's decision to simply be overridden on the spot by the judge. And even if it survives that, almost all big judgments are modified on appeal. The jury isn't sovereign in deciding civil cases, so what purpose does it serve other than as another stumbling block where things can go wrong?
The US is about the only First World country that has trial by jury in civil cases. There's a reason for this. No one would come up with a system like this today; why should we stick with it just because the Founding Fathers thought it was a good idea 220 years ago?
the jury only took 2-3 days to deliberate
"they should be put before an expert tribunal rather than a jury that is easily swayed by schoolyard 'copycat' narratives."
Clearly, the solution is to have juries working at the patent office, scrutinizing each patent for 2-3 days, and patent examiners in the courtroom to accept/reject patent cases using the half-day or less they use now when granting patents in the first place.
The advantage in the UK of course is a specialized Patent Court with Judges and no juries. These Judges are patent specialists spending their time only looking at Patent cases. They are a very sharp bunch. I recall one incident in which the Judge suspended a complex case so he could go and learn some pretty high level biochemistry from the head of biochemistry at Cambridge.
They need to understand something about patent law and something about the subject matter. The Jury foreman actually said this in an interview:
"...wether or not the prior really did invalidate that patent, and so with that moment that I had, I relealized that the software on the Apple side could not be placed into the processor on the prior art and vise versa and that means that they're not interchagable, and that just that just changed everything right there"
Would you trust this guy to be on a jury for a case you were involved with? Obviously he was in over his head and just pulling stuff out of his nether regions. The rest of the jury followed him. And this is a guy who holds a patent and should, ostensibly, have some simple understanding of prior art.
sigh... anon, the framers of the US constitution disagree with you. If a dozen or so randomly chosen citizens can't come to an agreement on what a law means, then the law is too complex. Otherwise laws can be written such that anyone can be thrown in the slammer or fined for arcane phrases interpreted by "experts" in ivory towers. Juries are used as a hedge against many other tricks used by powerful governments against it's citizens as well.
I'd love to respond to you, but I don't understand what you've written. I suppose it's just possible that I'm the idiot here, but perhaps there's another explanation, huh ?
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
I am not sure that was the problem here.
One problem that I do see is that the jury foreman is a patent holder himself. That could of been an impact. There's a good chance he didn't like the idea that a jury could come back and say that some patents being given out right now are unfair and/or worthless.
In fact, the judge had to have the jury correct their verdict since, in at least 2 cases, they decided to award Apple damages even after they said that Samsung didn't infringe in that instance.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Guilty? Innocent? Prosecution? Defense?
"Guilt" and "Innocence" are criminal concepts. In a civil case, like this one, the jury finds "for" one party or the other. Guilty or not guilty are not concepts that exist here
There also is no prosecution. That term refers to a state prosecutor in a criminal case. There is a plaintiff and his/her/it's attorney.
"Objects in motion slow down because they get tired." - Aristotle
In so far as Samsung referenced the iPhone as a de facto standard of what users want and expect from a touchscreen smart phone, yes. Samsung did indeed set out to copy parts of the iPhone.
However, to claim that such behavior is "crap" and that the jury's decision was correct _requires_ you assume that the patents were entirely valid. If there was prior art, then Samsung no more copied Apple than Apple copied the prior art (and neither innovated). If the design was trivial and uninteresting, then Apple didn't achieve any significant innovation for Samsung to copy... It'd be like complaining that someone used the same typeface as you. Sure you probably spent more time thinking about it then they did to say 'eh... just do what they did', but on the other hand it's uninteresting and unimportant and you don't deserve an international monopoly on it.
So, no, I consider this case (or, the software parts of it) to be exactly software patents are bad and the results it achieved precisely why software parents are so dangerous. Yes, Samsung copied things. Stupid, trivial things. Stupid trivial things that don't benefit society to be disclosed (part of the social 'deal' of patents) nor do they deserve protection. Things that a smaller company without a patent arsenal to build would simply put in as a new feature and forget. Things for which being first to market is payment enough. And yet these things create a billion dollar verdict? I think that's way, _way_ off pace of the "right result".
(And of course, even if you accept the patents, there are cases where some device/patent combinations the jury identified as infringement are clearly incorrect. Oh, and that the jury set out to punish Samsung (by their own admission) rather than try for reasonable damages. Etc. So, actually, I think it was all around a pretty poor decision.)
A jury system is a "check" on the power of the government to enforce unjust laws. Basically weakens the ability of the government to just toss people into jail without opposition. (Unless they call it "indefinite detainment" under the NDAA.)
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Any adult, given enough facts as presented by both sides, should be able to come to a conclusion as to guilty or innocent.
When the facts are written in legalese, like patent documents, it is easy for the average person to become confused and ignore that evidence. This case was even worse in that the foreman was a self described "expert" and the rest of the jury deferred to his judgement. In effect, this was not a decision of 12 members of a jury but a decision of one expert convincing 11 non-experts.
If it required an in-depth knowledge of the law, we would only have lawyers for jurors, and I think we can all agree that's not a great idea
That is precisely what one gets in a trial by judge. Lawyers who do not have a stake in the outcome of a case can be very impartial and in complex cases like patent law knowledge is the key. It takes years to learn patent law. Do you really think that anyone can absorb all that information in a few weeks of trial? How much of the nuances are lost due to information overload?
The more in-depth knowledge one has on a topic, the less likely you are to get a consensus and the less likely you are to be able to look at a case objectively.
That is precisely the issue in this situation. The jury foreman was well versed in patent law as viewed by a patent holder. When technical questions arose the jury took the foreman's advice instead of deciding on their own or asking the judge question. Legal definitions and complex laws such as patent law are difficult at best. 700 questions is a huge number in a legal case. It take a lot of brain power to keep them straight. Most of the people in this group are well above average intelligence and we have issues dealing with these subjects. Do you really think that someone with an IQ of 90 would have fewer issues?
Patent law is too complex for the average person.
Screw "expert tribunal", fight to the death! Each side puts up 12 contenders (to tie it to the jury system), twelve "angry" men (or women, whichever). Then, fight it out Kirk & Spock style, ala koon-ut-kal-if-fee in 'Amok Time'. Damages are based on the number of surviving "jurors".
Because otherwise, the "experts" will just get bought off like every other "regulatory" body in the US and it won't be any fun for anyone. I'd be OK if at least one of the jurors was a VP or higher.
Scott
"Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid."
But it isn't.
Also, Apple doesn't make coats out of puppies.
The flip side of that is that you have ignorant people that are easily swayed by propaganda into wanting to "send a message". This can be compounded by someone on the jury having an obvious conflict of interest.
Vor dire clearly failed in this instance.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Of the top of my head I see four obvious suspects for such a capitalization loss:
1. Investors/speculators agreeing with the Jury.
2. Investors/speculators thinking that other investors/speculators will agree with the Jury.
3. Investors/speculators thinking that the legal system overall will side with the Jury (appeals and future similar cases).
4. Investors/speculators thinking that it will cost Samsung lots of money (directly or just opportunity costs in having to change things) and hence make them significantly less competitive.
Only one of those involves actually agreeing with the Jury themselves. I'm sure there are a bunch more too.
nonsense.
BOTH sides had patents they were trying to enforce. He could easily have sided with Samsung with respect to their patents, but he didn't.
You are attributing a motive to someone because you didn't like the outcome so now you are coming up with rationalizations for why it turned out the way it did.
Everyone is coming up with their own conspiracy theory.
Oh, its an attack on FOSS
Oh, the judge was paid off
Oh, the jury was biased against a foreign company.
Oh, we are all doomed because of round rectangles.
There are people on the other side of the coin that thought the outcome was just. What was their motive? They were just seduced by Apple?
I don't like software patents as much as the next guy. Until they change, this is the game that we have to play. This is why Google spent so much on Motorola to get its patents.
If everyone would just look around, the same BS happens in many other areas, automobile innovation, tv's, biotechnology.
My hands are wet with light blue paint. The person next to me has purple paint on his hands. You are not colour blind. The evidence has dark blue paint on it. The prosecution and/or defense is not telling you the full an unaltered truth. The judge has disallowed other evidence. Which one of us is guilty? Did I try to wash off the dark blue paint from my hands and made it light blue? Did the other guy try to hide the blue paint on his hands by mixing it with red? Are we both innocent and the wrong people are being tried? Has the evidence that was allowed been altered in some way?
Good luck solving the mystery.
Especially since he patented the TiVo, several years after it was released.
Jurors are not supposed to know the people involved in the trial, it creates huge bias.
What I want to know is how did they find so many people who did not know Apple or Samsung?
Because, of course, if a juror had a iPad and liked it (or just saw an apple ad, or read an article by someone saying that the iPad inspired these other devices) he/she would be biased towards Apple. So of course the only fair trial you could have would be one where all the jurors had never even heard of Apple or Samsung.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
But what if all people in the jury were color blind and one that claimed to be able to see color, claimed that the evidence had blue paint on it? Would that still be the concept of the US law?
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
It is the responsibility of the prosecution and defense to make sure they can come to an informed opinion given the necessary information as presented by both sides.
The primary argument being that this an intractable problem. You are banking on the ability of lawyers to teach a jury portions of law they will understand enough to rule the way each side is advocating. That fundamentally mistreats jurors and the law, it limits the ability of jurors to recognize information outside the scope presented by a lawyer (who might be bad, or simply underestimates the jury), and it supposes that laws can be considered in piecemeal isolation.
Any adult, given enough facts as presented by both sides, should be able to
That is a truly profound assumption, which is the basis of much of jury based legal systems. It's quite possible this assumption is wrong. Whether it's demonstrably right or wrong is harder to say, because legal systems that don't have juries are different from ones that do on more than just the existence of juries.
we would only have lawyers for jurors, and I think we can all agree that's not a great idea ;)
um....
That's actually a good idea. In effect it is what your supreme court is, which is a 9 rather than 12 person jury of professional legal experts. Just about every country has the most important cases decided by a collection of lawyers or lawmakers for precisely the reason that it is simply not appropriate to have common people establishing definitive precedents.
The more in-depth knowledge one has on a topic, the less likely you are to get a consensus and the less likely you are to be able to look at a case objectively
A lack of consensus may be preferable to decisions based on purely superficial understandings of problems. Broadly speaking the thrust of the article is that Juries aren't capable of making good decisions about patent law, in part because of jurors themselves and in part because the legal system is constrained by having to work around these 'common people' where you are burdening them and their employers to resolve a dispute that justifies far more time and far more expertise than is available to a jury, and may broadly require addressing much deeper questions. Should rectangles be patentable at all is a question that should be addressed before a jury is ever told 'assume they are patentable and work based on that assumption', because that's an absurdly stupid process.
The three basic points he makes:
1. Juries start biased, and are being asked to overcome that bias. Which is certainly true of both professional and non professionals.
2. It's harder to prove a negative than a positive, even if the negative is better. 'He copied me, that's why I have a patent on this and he doesn't' is easier to understand than 'we knew that too, but we didn't patent it because it shouldn't be patentable at all' is an inherently worse argument to make. I'm not sure I agree with this, but it's a psychological argument about how juries perceive information and there are valid underlying psychological principles about how people perceive information that have to be considered.
3. Patent problems specifically should be handled by the people who actually issue patents. Whatever you think about juries, you should be able to have a discussion with the people who granted the patent at all about whether or not that should have happened, and the patent system itself may need to pass information up the chain to their government managers about things that are causing them problems. The thing is, patents sort of exist in their own sub legal domain already, I guess the argument about apple vs samsung is that it was outside that sub domain, but that's more of a specific problem than a problem in general with the patents appeal process.
The more science you put in the courtroom the more juries are going to b
nonsense.
BOTH sides had patents they were trying to enforce. He could easily have sided with Samsung with respect to their patents, but he didn't.
The fact that he held patents at all means he should have been dismissed. There's a reason why, for example, in Oracle v Google, potential jurors that are in the technology sector or had used Java were excused. That reason: because only evidence brought into trial is supposed to be used to determine the outcome. By having patents in his head, he has information that he can't avoid tapping into during deliberation. Lawyers typically screen for that kind of thing and it's surprising they didn't. Perhaps because modern-day patents are all about corporate ownership, and the idea that an individual could hold one is outside their understanding.
That he wasn't dismissed turned out to be a gamble for Apple and a blunder for Samsung. Further reading here. Choice quote:
The foreman told a court representative that the jurors had reached a decision without needing the instructions.
More Twoson than Cupertino
are supposed to be in charge of this country. We do not elect the judicial branch of our government, so we need juries to help keep our fingers in the system. If any aspect of the legal system is "too complicated for lay people to understand", the solution is to simplify the system, NOT to remove the people from the equation.
Surely the peers should all be faceless, billion+ dollar, global corporations with huge patent portfolios, no?
It's easy when the jury doesn't follow the Judge's instructions.
Good idea. Have them tried by Microsoft, IBM, HP, Oracle, and a couple of others.
Judge: And how do you find?
Foreman: Hang them both.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
The fact that he held patents at all means he should have been dismissed. There's a reason why, for example, in Oracle v Google, potential jurors that are in the technology sector or had used Java were excused. That reason: because only evidence brought into trial is supposed to be used to determine the outcome. By having patents in his head, he has information that he can't avoid tapping into during deliberation.
You're making up reasons to believe the trial was unfair because you didn't like the outcome. Stop that.
If the trial was about the validity of the patent system itself and the outcome influenced the validity of patents in a global sense, being a patent holder would be a legitimate reason for exclusion.
But that's not what the trial was about. At all. I realize you slashtards are groupthinking yourselves into believing some gross miscarriage of justice must have happened because you don't like the outcome, and therefore are reading a lot more into events than is warranted, but back in the real world the main question put before the jury was whether Samsung violated Apple's patents.
Samsung could (and did) try to defend itself by attacking the validity of those patents, but overturning them would not have threatened the foreman's own patent.
Lawyers typically screen for that kind of thing and it's surprising they didn't. Perhaps because modern-day patents are all about corporate ownership, and the idea that an individual could hold one is outside their understanding.
Are you fucking kidding me? Listen to yourself. That's the sound of blatant over-the-top rationalization. Just stop. You're making a fool of yourself.
That he wasn't dismissed turned out to be a gamble for Apple and a blunder for Samsung.
Or maybe... just maybe... both of them thought he wasn't biased and were confident enough about their cases to believe that he'd go with them.
Further reading here. Choice quote:
The foreman told a court representative that the jurors had reached a decision without needing the instructions.
You're regurgitating this crap where Groklaw abuses a statement out of context to imply the jury completely disregarded instructions? That kinda says it all.
In a criminal trial, yes. In a civil trial, not so much. To my knowledge, tautologically speaking, no one has ever been jailed as a result of a civil trial other than for misconduct during the trial process (contempt of court, etc.)....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Patents are as complex as other industrial policies like subsidies or regulatory regimes. When disputes arise, they should be put before an expert tribunal rather than a jury that is easily swayed by schoolyard "copycat" narratives.
The same case could be made that voters have no place in democracy. And is: Those seeking to concentrate political and economic strength in the hands of the few and powerful pose governance as a choice between decision making by wise and altruistic "experts" or by the ignorant and selfish common people. The myth of benevolent despotism is as old as the hills.
But that rhetoric was busted long ago. "Industrial Policy" is a euphemism for corporate welfare. "Expert tribunals" are typically comprised of those expert in only cronyism and graft if not incompetent ideologues. So the plan is that a small group of politically appointed experts will assign penalties and grant awards of billions of dollars. What could possibly go wrong?
For those who are not aware, the plan to enact all-powerful government controlled by the benevolent and wise has never really worked out . The actual course has been to grant government powers and then debate our preference for rule by the corrupt few or the incompetent many. (See TFA and surrounding comments.) Perhaps instead we should all consider before granting more power to government that it will not be wielded by wise and benevolent philosopher kings. Those with the knowledge that government power by any system is often misapplied and abused are less willing to grant power to government.
Fundamentally, the choice between administering patent law with "expert tribunals" or trial by jury is a false dichotomy, for we could remedy the problem as well by abolishing patents.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
How could one person force 11 other people to vote his way? And what "send a message" are you talking about? A message about what?
Or in the Apple-Samsung case, simply by claiming to be an expert on patents, prior art AND jury duty because he filed a patent himself and was on juries three times already.
Also, there were NINE jurors, not twelve.
As for sending the message... Well, besides the "Velvin Hogan is Batman" (4th jury duty? What is he, a professional juror?) there's that literal quote of his...
"We wanted to make sure the message we sent was not just a slap on the wrist," Hogan said. "We wanted to make sure it was sufficiently high to be painful, but not unreasonable."
Which is kind of an issue, since that is EXACTLY what the jury was instructed NOT to do.
There. Now you know.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Yeah no shit, not to mention jury selection can often "weed out" those with brains. There is a good reason why the old joke is "a jury is 12 people too stupid to get out of jury duty" because you can get some doozys in a jury trial. I won't post the entire story but my mom hung a jury for 2 weeks before the judge finally let them go because the rest of the jury thought all Italians were in the mob like "Goodfellas".
So I can see the point of this argument, hell many of us have been total nerds for decades but how many of us are familiar enough with patent law to be able to weed out the bullshit from the truth in a case THIS huge?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
And this is a guy who holds a patent and should, ostensibly, have some simple understanding of prior art.
Just because he holds a patent does not mean he has ANY understanding of prior art.
How about leave the system as it is, and 5% of all patent costs go to a fund who's sole purpose is to reveal prior art and offending patents. The targeted patents are based on some algorithm that will return the most to society. This fund should also be open to donations from geeks to big companies who has a say where their own money is spent. If Apple wants to fight a Google prior art I am good for that even if Apple is the devil's devil.
There will be a connection between the number of patents and the funds income. There still is intensive in applying for patents.
>But that's not what the trial was about. At all. I realize you slashtards are groupthinking yourselves into believing some gross miscarriage of justice must have happened because you don't like the outcome,
Four courts in four three countries had trials on the SAME patents. 3 out of 4 courts found in favour of the defendant. One of them found so STRONGLY in favour of the defendant that it ordered the claimant to publicly post advertisements declaring the innocence of the defendant. That's a highly unusual thing in a case not directly involving something like slander - it's the court telling the claimant that he was SERIOUSLY full of shit in bringing the suit.
1 out of the four trials finds in favour of the claimant. The Jury in this trial admits to "sending a message" - directly against the orders of the judge and also admits to reaching it's decision WITHOUT reading the jury instructions - which I'm pretty sure is grounds for a mistrial by itself.
But the truth is, that with this context, I (as a citizen of NONE of the countries involved and a customer of neither of these companies) have to conclude that the 4th trial WAS a massive miscarriage of justice. When 3/4 courts finds somebody innocent and the 4th finds guilt - all on the SAME available evidence (it's not like we suddenly discovered DNA testing for patents or something) - I believe that the odds are very good the 4th court screwed up.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
He was granted a DVR patent several years after the Tivo was released. I'd say he understands prior art very well, and has an obvious interest in prior art being ignored.
Unix is user friendly, it's just selective about who its friends are.