Slashdot Mirror
Supreme Court Rules In Favor of Patent Troll
An anonymous reader writes: The Supreme Court ruled today (PDF) that Cisco Systems can't skip out of a patent suit against them from patent troll Commil USA. The case reached the Supreme Court because Cisco argued it had a "good faith belief" that the patent they were infringing was invalid. The justices voted 6-2 that such a belief didn't matter if they were indeed infringing. The Supreme Court's opinion is that a company must know of the patent it's infringing, and that their product infringes upon the patent — which, at least, is more than what Commil was pushing.
The case isn't completely over — a $63.7 million verdict in Commil's favor was overturned by an Appeals Court, and now the Supreme Court has sent it back down for re-evaluation after it clarified the rules of infringement. The Appeals Court could still overturn the judgment for some other reason. The good news is that the Supreme Court dedicated a page in their opinion to telling lower courts how to sanction patent trolls and keep them from clogging the courts with ridiculous claims. "[I]t is still necessary and proper to stress that district courts have the authority and responsibility to ensure frivolous cases are dissuaded."
The case isn't completely over — a $63.7 million verdict in Commil's favor was overturned by an Appeals Court, and now the Supreme Court has sent it back down for re-evaluation after it clarified the rules of infringement. The Appeals Court could still overturn the judgment for some other reason. The good news is that the Supreme Court dedicated a page in their opinion to telling lower courts how to sanction patent trolls and keep them from clogging the courts with ridiculous claims. "[I]t is still necessary and proper to stress that district courts have the authority and responsibility to ensure frivolous cases are dissuaded."
All big IT companies are patent trolls.
Time to review the whole thing...
These articles are beyond worthless; I shouldn't have to go to another website to get the basic facts.
which is a double burden. much, much harder.
At some point, the trolls will collect enough tolls that we'll finally have to do something about the ridiculous patents that are granted.
Remember, the trolls are legally in the right, which makes it not a problem with bad ethics on the part of the trolls, but bad ethics on the part of our legal system or patent system.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
The logic the majority used in ruling on this case seems pretty simple (unless I'm totally off): the patent troll had a patent that was still legally valid because there had been no court challenge to declare it invalid. Because the patent was still legally valid, the infringement of the patent is still a valid cause of action in a lawsuit.
Scalia's logic is that you can bypass a legal challenge over a patent that might be ruled invalid in court because it was never valid in the first place. The question is, though, how would you know whether the patent is valid without the court saying so?
Why so vengeful?
Disclaimer: There are several patents under my name and I am getting royalty payments
Even as a patent holder I find what the SCOTUS did deeply troubling
Patents supposed to be protecting the inventors, but the patent system is in place right now has been abused by trolls
Instead of protecting the inventors in many cases - such the the one the SCOTUS just reviewed - the patents are used by the trolls to as some type of racketeering weapon
By ruling with the trolls the SCOTUS is siding with the racketeers
It seems the SCOTUS has finally decided to join all the other government agencies, in which, common sense is strictly forbidden
It seems like the owners of the patent are called "trolls" in this case because they don't manufacture anything; I didn't see anything from the news coverage about whether the patent itself is strong.
Furthermore, the patent itself has been upheld and Cisco has been found infringing. The only issue surrounds "inducement to infringe", meaning whether Cisco intended to get other people to infringe as well. That's a legalistic detail; even if the "trolls" lose the case on induced infringement, they still have a big verdict against Cisco for direct infringement, and that stands.
First off I think all Intellectual monopoly will go away in the next few decades because it will prove to be unworkable.
But if you are going to have this stupid system patent trolls serve an important purpose. They buy up patents from small inventors and in return provide the legal firepower the small inventors don't have.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
The patent trolls need to win until corporations break, only then will real change in patent laws occur in the legislature.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
so as long as there is no clear legislation against trolls, we haven't seen the last of them....
patent trolls to this day mostly impact large companies who are patent trolls themselves.
so when some competition arises it's patent troll versus patent troll, trolls set the system up, and I'm giddy that the system the big boys enacted to live enslaved to has come to bite their ass back.
the general public shouldn't care less about the issue of patents other than hoping the whole system explodes and patents, copyright, and trademark protections are abolished completely, serving little interest to the public in general who do not benefit from or utilize such methods to control others.
those methods are used to control the general public only. :)
obamasweapon.com
It is absurd that the USPTO has a massive backlog on patent issuance -- by law, it is expected that a patent term is 20 years from the filing date -- however there is an exception to that rule if the patent is not issued within 2 years -- if the patent is not issued within 2 years (due to a USPTO delay) the clock on that 20 years is paused until the patent issues. There are still hundreds of thousands of patents filed on things like HDTV which havent yet issued. It means that HDTV technology will be patent encumbered for the long term future. Nobody has the incentive to fix it. If you wanted to make an open hardware HDTV, you can't do it royalty free because a lot of the HDTV standards essential technologies are still patented and will STAY patented virtually forever thanks to the USPTO patent backlog. Why would any tech companies object to that? They make money off the patents they filed that got issued PLUS the ones that were filed but the USPTO hasnt taken action on them. Think about it this way if Sony filed two patents on HD technology, they get one of them issued fairly quickly within 2 years .. and then by luck or bribery the USPTO action on the second patent is delayed 19 years just as the first patent is expiring .. then because it's the USPTO's fault that the second patent didnt issue .. they get to claim 17 years of additional monopoly on the HD technology. I am not against patents, I am against infinitely long patents .. which are unconstitutional .. yet in practice the USPTO is enabling it. Let's not forget that the constitution only authorizes patent rights if and only if they enable the advancement of the useful arts and sciences (and those too for limited times).
Fuck the system, it's broken.
Thanks for pointing out that Roberts and Scalia were the 2 dissenters, which means that Thomas didn't vote with Scalia. I ask in all seriousness - is the first time ever that they haven't voted the same on a case?
and sounds based along the same lines of an individual can't ignore a law even if they think it will (at some point) be deemed unconstitutional. So Cisco should have moved to have the patent revoked prior to making use of it rather than infringe and then try after (if at all).
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2014/12/15/3603686/supreme-court-if-youre-a-cop-mistakes-about-the-law-wont-stop-your-drug-bust/
The Supreme Court says police can be mistaken about the laws governing their conduct, and that's fine. But a company can't be mistaken about whether a patent's validity will be upheld in court.
Well the expansion of various forms of post-grant practice is coming closer to your wish. IPR in particular is booming right now.
Again, I think changing the legal standard would have much more drastic consequences than people understand. But strong post-grant processes can go a long way toward killing the ridiculous patents that we all rail against.
Nothing posted to
patent trolls to this day mostly impact large companies who are patent trolls themselves.
Tell that to all the mobile app developers who've been targeted. In fact, because of the way the law works, it's often more profitable to go after lots of smaller targets for quick settlements which can have them paying royalties well past the patent's expiration date than it is to go after just a few large targets who can fight back with lengthy litigation and in the process disqualify you from going after those smaller targets after the verdict is in.
Rackspace fights patent troll in the name of every mobile developer everywhere
This is why I've stopped reading any IP postings on Slashdot. Isn't there anybody who can do a rudimentary fact-check on posts like this. Or -- now here's a radical idea -- with so many postings about patent law on this site, wouldn't it be a good idea for SD to bring on somebody who has the first fucking idea how U.S. patent law works??
FWIW, the poster here apparently stumbled across and misunderstood some MPEP regulations (or worse, read an uninformed posting by somebody else who stumbled & mis'd them), became outraged as only the ignorant can, wrote an angry, completely wrong post here, and SD posted it without asking any questions b/c it fits the site's anti-patent political agenda.
A few facts:
i) patent term is calculated from the date that an application is filed, not from the date when a patent is granted or issued
ii) patent term extension is far more complex than the poster thinks. There are many reasons why a patent's term may extend beyond 20 years after a filing date. It's pretty obvious that they poster has no idea what he's talking about.
iii) "Bribery"? Are you fucking kidding me? Who the fuck is this guy?
iv) This moron also keeps bringing up a scenario in which a patent is not issued within two years, as though that's some sort of threshold benchmark. It generally takes a lot longer than two years for a patent to issue, especially one that involves a hard-fought prosecution. And the fact that it takes longer than two years does not benefit the patentee. Think about it: Until a patent is granted, an inventor has at best only provisional protection, and the terms of that protection (that is, the scope of an issued patent) is not precisely defined until the final amendment. The termination date of the patent is unaffected by the duration of the prosecution unless the PTO screws up. So it's in a patentee's best interest to bring an application to issuance as quickly as possible. IOW, the poster here, looking for a conspiracy theory, has interpreted the situation completely backwards.
v) The other really dumbass thing about this posting is the two-patent HDTV example. Uh, it doesn't work like that. For one thing, you can't patent the same invention twice. If you try, the PTO will make you jump through many hoops & charge you many dollars until you alter one of the two to introduce a meaningful difference. If not, there is a way to overcome such a double-patenting rejection by filing a terminal disclaimer. That means that the patentee surrenders the extra patent term that might arise from such an unlikely scenario (19 years??? Has this guy ever been involved with a single patent prosecution effort??) Anyway, in English, what this means is that, after all the prosecution is done on the 2d patent, the only way the PTO would agree to issue it is if the patentee agrees to shorten the term of the same patent so that it ends at the same time as the 1st patent. So in the poster's example, the 2d patent merely costs thousands of dollars -- it doesn't add to the term of the patent protection.
vi) So here's the bottom line. Patent term extension is not a windfall for a patentee. It's a makeshift fix to a potentially big fucking problem that can occur if the Patent Office screws up and delays certain types of actions beyond the statutory limits. If, for example, the PTO has a statutory three-month limit to respond to an applicant's amendment, but takes seven, the applicant can be awarded an extra four months of term if and when the patent issues. This is not some sort of perk for the applicant -- it's compensation for the PTO's screw-up, which has prejudiced an applicant by delaying an issuance.
vii) Even more idiotic is the poster's paranoid-ignorant assertions that inventors and the PTO are somehow linked in some sort of conspiracy to create "permanent" patents by means of patent-term extension. Having dealt with the PTO literally hundreds of times, I can tell you that the opposite is true. A
See subject "Forrest" & this -> http://tech.slashdot.org/comme...