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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
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.
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.
Aha, so ignorance breeds just conclusions. I guess creationism must be true after all.
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 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.
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.
"Objects in motion slow down because they get tired." - Aristotle
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.
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.
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?
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