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A Federal Judge's Decision Could End Patent Trolling (computerworld.com)
"Forcing law firms to pay defendants' legal bills could undermine the business model of patent trolls," reports Computerworld. whoever57 writes: Patent trolls rely on the fact that they have no assets and, if they lose a case, they can fold the company that owned the patent and sued, thus avoiding paying any of the defendant's legal bills. However in a recent case, the judge told the winning defendant that it can claim its legal bills from the law firm. The decision is based on the plaintiff's law firm using a contract under which it would take a portion of any judgment, making it more than just counsel, but instead a partner with the plaintiff. This will likely result in law firms wanting to be paid up front, instead of offering a contingency-based fee.
The federal judge's decision "attacks the heart of the patent-troll system," according to the article, which adds that patent trolls are "the best evidence that pure evil exists."
The federal judge's decision "attacks the heart of the patent-troll system," according to the article, which adds that patent trolls are "the best evidence that pure evil exists."
The recent rash of clickbait on Slashdot made me expect this headline to be, "Could a Federal Judge's Decision End Patent Trolling?"
Thanks for not being a shitposting assclown. May your peers follow your example.
Not to deny that abuse of the patent-system is wrong, but things like murdering a girl after raping her seem evil of considerably higher purity.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
It's logical, it's practical, it has no downsides I can imagine. Why can't we have more common sense judgment like this?
according to the article, which adds that patent trolls are "the best evidence that pure evil exists."
Really? That's a little hyperbolic don't you think? Yes patent trolls are a very bad thing but let's not exaggerate their impact or how much they matter. They certainly are not evil on the scale of slavery or war or genocide or any number of other horrific crimes. I'm tempted to make some snarky Trump joke since he is (not kidding) better evidence for pure evil than patent trolls but even that would be an unfair comparison given some of the real evils of the world.
Patent trolls are extortionists and leeches on society and terrible human beings but the "best evidence that pure evil exists"? No. No they are not.
For starters, this decision is non-precedential. It was issued by a District court, and not the Federal Circuit or SCOTUS.
Secondly, per a Law360 article, the reason for the attorneys fees award against the law firm was, per a law360 article:
The court awarded attorneys’ fees against AlphaCap and its counsel, Gutride Safier LLP, on the theory that AlphaCap and Gutride Safier multiplied the proceedings in this case unreasonably and vexatiously,” McCrary wrote. “The record, however, establishes that it was Gust and its counsel, not AlphaCap and Gutride Safier, who unreasonably and vexatiously multiplied the proceeding.”
Thus, this ruling has nothing to do with patent trolling being dealt a death blow, but rather unscrupulous counsel being punished.
It just means patent lawyers will be more careful how they structure their contracts from now on.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
A patent troll however is a totally sane and calculating individual according to any textbook. However he does his actions anyways. That is pure evil.
You seriously think patent trolls are as bad as genocide? Slavery? Premeditated murder? You need to sort out your priorities mate because if you really believe patent trolls are the worst of all evils then you have some seriously messed up notions about the world and ethics.
best evidence of pure evil
Yeah, so now you create lots of shell law firms.
Until the courts go after people PERSONALLY (you know, like they do every time you get a ticket) there will be no change of behaviour.
Throwing a few lawyers in jail will do so much more for the profession than fining anyone.
AC
I hope the sue for profit industry gets shutdown.
it has no downsides I can imagine.
If generalized beyond patent trolling suits it could severely limit the ability of shallow-pocket plaintiffs to obtain legal council on a contingency fee basis to obtain redress for the torts that damaged, and perhaps impoverished, them.
The result would be that the legal system becomes accessible only to the rich.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Guess what: we've changed our morality,and people now throw up when they see a dismembered body, whereas it used to be quiet time to eat in war when it was all pointy sticks and so forth.
I'm not a lawyer, but my best friend since college is. We're both Americans. I probably know more about how the US legal system really works as a result of this friendship than how almost all non-lawyers do. The truth is that judges don't like to award court costs nor do lawyers really like it when they do this because it discourages lawsuits and lawyers and judges both think that the system is fine just like it is and having fewer lawsuits is actually bad. Some judges won't ever award costs to the winner. Some will only do so to send a message to people they think really abuse the system. It seems to me that this is considered to be an unusual situation rather than something that will set a precedent. Also, judges often ignore anything they feel like, so the fact that court costs got awarded in case A doesn't at all mean that they will be in case B in front of a different judge even if the circumstances that led to the awarded are essentially identically.
Here's an example. Suppose you have neighbor who doesn't like you and the neighbor sues you for something really stupid and asks for a huge monetary award. Suppose that you win, but the case is extraordinarily difficult and time consuming and you end up ruined financially from having to pay the costs to defend yourself against this frivolous lawsuit. You can probably count on one hand the number of judges and lawyers who actually feel sorry for you. From their perspective the system worked perfectly. You got sued for something bogus and you won. The fact that it destroyed you financially to defend yourself is not their concern. Not at all.
The question is "Do contingency fees make lawers liable for court costs?" If the answer is yes it has implications far beyond punishing patent trolls. Any case involving contingency fes could put lawyers at risk of liability, whether it is a class action, accident claim or any other action involving a contingency fee. The goodness of that is debatable.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
and generally come from well to do families. If you've lived your entire life without any major hurdles or problems it's hard to imagine anyone who has. There's a meme for it: What don't the poor just buy more money. It's kinda funny, and an exaggeration, but there's a fair amount of truth in it.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Perhaps any lawsuit must have the names ( signatures ) of the people involved,
whoever controls the company, LLC, etc. if there is a citizen/individual on one end of the lawsuit.
Then require all participants to pay if required... Losers, especially trolls, will not lke this.
The lawyers will not lke this. Judges should not care, professionally.
This sort of thing still goes on all over the world. Just watch the news sometime.
Date rape is rape. Otherwise sane and functional people do this.
Murder is usually a crime of desperation, and otherwise sane people do it too.
A change in popular moral values is not the same thing as a change in "sanity." People with fully functional, non-damaged brains are capable of rape and murder. Unfortunate circumstances, more than anything else, tend to bring out the evil in people.
If it takes X amount of evil to do something, and a sane, calculating person with that much evil does the deed, it's fair to describe the act as "pure evil," even if it is NOT fair to describe it as "extremely evil."
If it takes 10X amount of evil to do something if you are sane but only 9X amount to do something if you are mentally ill, and a person who is "9X evil, but mentally ill" does the deed, it's fair to describe it as "extremely evil" but not "pure evil" - if it weren't for the mental illness the person would not have done the deed, as he wasn't evil enough to do the act absent the mental illness.
Rape and murder are extremely evil.
Financial crimes are much lower on the numerical evil scale, but, as another poster pointed out, they are frequently done by people who are sane, rational, and who are driven to act by evil (greed, usually) alone, hence the act can be described as a "pure evil action."
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Patent troll borrows money from a bank at very high interest rates or sells junk bonds to raise money to file lawsuits. The loan will be a "balloon" loan or the bonds will be zero-coupon bonds, so the patent troll won't have any expenses for several years.
If he fails, the bank or bondholders are left holding the bag.
If he wins, the bank or bond-holders make a tidy profit.
Do like Hollywood does and form a new legal entity for every lawsuit.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Attorneys fees aren't awarded in garden-variety troll cases, and this decision does absolutely nothing to change that. Here, at a minimum, the plaintiff's attorneys:
1. Filed suit on a patent that (even by troll standards) was almost certainly invalid after the Supreme Court's Alice decision (issued the year before the suit was filed).
2. Filed suit in the Eastern District of Texas when there was not even the thinnest veneer of a basis to do so.
3. After this defendant refused to settle for small potatoes like the others, plaintiff first offered a covenant not to sue (which also would have made the current case go away), then when defendant announced its intent to seek fees, litigated the case for another year and a half in two different states and ran up defendant's costs even more.
This might give pause to attorneys taking on a handful of really egregious cases around the margins, but IMO isn't going to take very much of a bite out of the troll industry in general -- the game will just shift to the next-higher-quality tier of patents.
Now, the TC Heartland venue case that the Supreme Court has decided to take? That's the one that could significantly impact the troll community -- keep an eye on it.
In a more perfect world, a lawyer's ethical obligations would preclude him from taking on a case that is "obviously frivolous."
If a judge found that a case was "obviously frivolous" then the judge would be encouraged to fine the lawyer personally and would be required to refer the lawyer to the state bar, which would likely fine him an additional amount equal to what his client paid him for that case. Lawyers who got many such referrals relative to their peers (lawyers with similar caseloads and specializations) would see judges scrutinize their future cases much more closely, and those with huge numbers of referrals would see their license suspended or otherwise sanctioned.
In a more perfect world.
Not gonna happen. Sigh.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
LLC
There are certain restrictions on the ownership structures of law firms. In the past (things may have changed), limited liability was not allowed. Hence, law firms were structured as partnerships.
One interesting structure for monetizing risk is Lloyd's of London. Where investors could sign on to receive the proceeds of insurance premiums. But there was no limit on the down side should someone make an insurance claim. So the investors stood to lose quite a lot. Lawsuits have a different financial structure than insurance. The latter having very large losses (claims) and lesser upsides (premiums). Lawsuits have very large upsides (huge awards for the plaintiffs) and lower, limited downsides (court costs).
The problem (which I don't see being solved anytime soon) is that the calculation of damages by plaintiffs (patent trolls) tends to be outlandish, with little basis in reality. An organization that builds nothing didn't lose any sales when someone else went to market with that technology. Lost sales or licensing fees are purely hypothetical if all someone does is sit on a patent for years.
Have gnu, will travel.
That's true the law firm was held liable for costs based in the actions of this law firm, the same reasoning doesn't apply to other patent suites generally. HOWEVER, 90% of patent trolling is done by just a handful of law firms, who all pretty much act the same way. So the reasoning does apply to the vast majority of patent troll suits.
Because about 90% of patent trolling is done by only a handful of law firms, who all sue on questionable patents in East Texas and generally follow a similar pattern of behavior, this certainly could have a significant effect. Heck, even knocking one of the top five troll firms out of the trolling business would be significant.
what about Apple?
How do you stop Apple type of Paten Trolling?
Because about 90% of patent trolling is done by only a handful of law firms
I'm curious exactly what "handful"/"five or so" you have in mind. I just pulled up the 8 clusters of cases filed so far this year in the Eastern District of Texas, and what do you know -- 8 different law firms. Similar picture back into December (which is far as I care to look back right now and I think adequately makes the point).
and generally follow a similar pattern of behavior
In this situation that's irrelevant even if true. The only way this particular ruling is going to give any trolls much pause is if the vast majority of patents they might assert in the future are Alice-susceptible. That's a far smaller percentage of patents than you might think.
Finally, I'll point out that this ruling came out of the Southern District of New York, after the plaintiff was obtuse enough to badly lose the transfer motion and then keep litigating in the new court for over a year. Transfers of any cases out of East Texas are rare enough, much less of questionable cases filed by plaintiffs that just don't know when to fold 'em.
Rephrasing the headline slightly does not necessarily make it not clickbait. What about making it a question supposedly makes it less resistable to click? The sentiment is still there, and that sentiment does not need to be in the headline. The idea that one decision alone would end patent trolling rather than send it to a different jurisdiction or some other outcome is the idea that needs to be excised here, not just that it is a question.
There is only one country where the costs of medical care are generally accrued to the individual as opposed to spread out across society in general. But then there is health insurance, Medicare, and Medicaid which changes things, so I don't know what the best balance of conciseness and accuracy is. But your meme needs to die.
Actual invention like all of intellectual property is not what it is made out to be. Discovery.
I don't know how this in fact works, and apparently zero research is being done on the subject, but that's not how this works.
No, we need to change the rules of the game to not reward such behavior.
Exchange for allocation of life is nowhere near the same as being unable to continue your life. And if you weren't spending your life doing something you enjoy for the duration you were also getting remunerated for doing, it, that's totally on you.
It's interesting that we have such different information, considering that you seem to be fairly well informed, yet I've received information from multiple reliable sources that doesn't match what you're saying. I am speaking specifically of patent TROLLS, not all cases related to patents.
You asked which law firms. Austin Hansley and Craig Tadlock filed 10% of all NPE patent cases in 2015. I don't recall other names offhand, but Hansley and Tadlock account for maybe 20% of TROLL suits (guesstimating, because many patents are legitimately licensed to manufacturers).
Continued below due to lameness filter triggering in one of the words.
Certainly not all such patents have the issue decided in Alice, I didn't say they did. I said they tend to be questionable patents, as applied to the defendants. And they tend to engage in trollish behavior that is disrespectful to the court, as these attorneys did. I suppose that's a bit by definition - trolls act trollish.
Prenda did the same KINDS of things, which is why they were considered trolls and the courts shut them down. Prenda were of course copyright trolls, but the trollish tactics were the same and the court responded appropriately, as it did in this case.
Perhaps the difference in what we're saying is that I'm speaking specifically when I say trolls, not all patent-related cases, not all east Texas cases; but I'm speaking generally when I say they engage in similar patterns of trolish behavior, while the details may differ. Maybe you're thinking of the specific issues in the case, and also thinking of a wider variety of cases.
This is a brilliant decision !
intellectual property is a BS term invented 20 yrs to monetize computer work in an effort to keep it when the employees left.
> The only way ... if the vast majority of patents they might assert in the future are Alice-susceptible
I wonder where you get that. I see the holding as essentially:
Attorneys who file meritless suits on a contingency basis may be liable for costs, especially if they engage in actions which are similar to, but not quite, abuse of abuse of process, malicious prosecution, or barratry. I don't see that Alice ("on a computer") is the key element here.
Certainly "meritless suits on a contingency basis, with a hint of the odor barratry" applies to many patent trolls.
Punishing slimy patent trolls and their lawyers may be considered good. But the same principal applied in other ways may serve to make lawsuits more expensive, and further limiting the game to the very wealthy
Funny, I thought it was invented by the entertainment industry. Do you have a citation for your claim?
So nothing to do with authors and musicians then? Or steam engines and railways?
Go back to primary school where you belong.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Aaah yes, steam engines, the number one argument against patents.
Watt gets the credit for inventing the steam engine - but he did nothing of the kind. Steam engines have been around since the ancient greeks. Getting progressively better over the centuries. By the 15th century there were more than a few steam powered mills in Britain.
What Watt did do was come up with a good mathematically concise way of measuring the amount of work a machine did, which allowed him to compare various designs for efficiency and come up with the best combination of known technologies at that time. Not a single one of the designs was his own - he merely figured out which designs for various parts were the best performing and then put them all together. Along with a wealthy financier -they then pushed steam power for trains.
Great inventions are never the work of one man or company - they are always the culmination of thousands of years of gradual improvement by thousands of people, and the INEVITABLE result of the state of human knowledge at any given time. Which is why, for any invention you wish to think off, you will find several competing claims as to who made it (besides whoever got the common credit) and generally at least 2 of them will have genuinely and independently come up with the same design without any knowledge of one another's work at teh same time.
Invention is a consequence of the collective history of all science, when the science reaches the point where an invention becomes possible it WILL happen - and it SEVERAL people will see the possibility.
So why does ONE of those people get a piece of paper saying the others aren't allowed to be rewarded for it ? Why does the government interfere with the market by giving one of those people a monopoly ?
The ostensible argument is - if you allow them to compete right away then (all) the inventors will keep the working of their products secret, which means the product could be lost when they go. This is certainly a concern - but patents are a very poor solution to that problem. Even if you do accept it, it has nothing to do with the absolutely ridiculous notion that ideas can be owned.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
"I don't shoot my mouth off without knowing what I'm talking about" - by raymorris ( 2726007 ) on Thursday December 31, 2015 @09:29AM (#51215379)
BS (I catch you shooting your mouth off fucking up constantly): 2 raymorris security fuckups https://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5351503&cid=47379233/ & https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5351503&cid=47374033/ admitting you = script kiddie https://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=8895203&cid=51726265/
&
Tell us how ONLY 'newer script kiddie tools' have stringlength built in (when PASCAL had it for ages - my fav tool) https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=8472509&cid=51114383/ YOU BLUNDERING WANNABE!
APK
P.S.=> You like to talk behind others' backs like the gossiping bitch TROLL you are raymorris https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=9880997&cid=53312265/ well, here I am letting YOU TALK in those links, showing your FAILS wannabe ... apk
Lost sales or licensing fees are purely hypothetical if all someone does is sit on a patent for years.
Suppose you hold 2 patents for doing the same thing. One patent would result in more profit and a more expensive good/service, the other in less profit but a cheaper good/service.
You implement the more profitable patent.
Someone else 'steals' that 'intellectual property' for the less profitable patent, brings it to market selling that product or service for a lot less than you sell it for. Say through good marketing, they start to make a big profit out of this and your profits fall (because your good/service is now overpriced).
I guess thats a counterexample?
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
"I don't shoot my mouth off without knowing what I'm talking about" - by raymorris ( 2726007 ) on Thursday December 31, 2015 @09:29AM (#51215379)
I catch you shooting your mouth off fucking up constantly: 2 raymorris security fuckups https://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5351503&cid=47379233/ & https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5351503&cid=47374033/ + you = script kiddie https://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=8895203&cid=51726265/
&
Tell us how ONLY 'newer script kiddie tools' have stringlength built in (when PASCAL had it for ages - my fav tool) https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=8472509&cid=51114383/ YOU BLUNDERING WANNABE!
APK
P.S.=> You like to talk behind others' backs like the gossiping bitch TROLL you are raymorris https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=9880997&cid=53312265/ well, here I am letting YOU TALK in those links, showing your FAILS wannabe ... apk
Inoculation is very cheap in comparison to all the other health care products out there and while I'm not sure how much it costs for people with a deductable, if you can't afford to pay for it, there are programs to pay for most of the cost for such people.
https://www.bing.com/search?q=...
The main difference is that you're looking at numbers for 2015, which was a significant peak. In 2016, there were 1661 patent cases filed in EDTX (about 35% down from 2015). Of those, Tadlock filed 75 cases (4.5%) and Austin Hansley filed 11 (0.6%). Another secondary difference could be that you're only considering about 50% of the cases filed in EDTX to be troll cases. That's a matter of labeling to some degree, but is somewhat low IMO.
Interesting, thanks. I suppose one could say that Alice creates a new category of "objectively baseless" patents. Where Octane Fitness articulates the "objectively baseless" test, Alice declares that "on a computer" patents are objectively baseless.
Market segmentation works well to maximize profits. You keep the quality patent and charge a premium for it. And abandon the crappy patent to competitors. The customers who place a premium on quality buy yours. Cost sensitive customers buy the cheap stuff.
This doesn't maximize your profits. But it does in the economy as a whole. Since the aim of patents and copyrights is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts", that would logically include maximizing profits across the entire industry.
Have gnu, will travel.