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."

Comments

Re:Is THAT really "pure evil"?

[klingens]

I kinda disagree.
A murdering rapist is a totally batshit crazy insane individual. So far off the reservation there is not even a planet in sight. No standard of behaviour can be expected from such a person. Probably cannot really comprehend what he's doing.

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.

Batshit crazy vs. pure evil.

Re:Inaccurate

[gumbi west]

It's a good idea for you to get pedantic because your comment is besides the point.

If there is a sick baby, on what basis do you deny the child care? What about a person who has worked hard all their life, gets sick, and then loses their employer sponsored heath care? Before Obamacare, they were basically left for dead. This is not an argument I'd want to take your side on.

Medicare is not free, you pay a premium and then you pay coinsurance. Go get scraped up in another country and see if they ask if you have paid the premium (have your card) or come after you for the coinsurance.

The most frequent criticism of the French system is that everyone gets everything that they want. But they pay less for their care than we do--by half. That is, at least partly, because they don't have to pay for someone to sit at a desk denying claims the first four times to make sure you really want it covered, 20 companies negotiating with each hospital on the rate for every procedure a hospital can possibly perform, and generally throwing in a middle man that offers no actual medical care. In slashdot terms, if you ran a debugger on the medical system, you would cutout the insurance company.

If you have been or had a family member who has been very sick there is a pretty good chance that you would realize that our system is far from perfect. And we pay twice what everyone else does for an imperfect system.

Why not take half off and stop making people pay for things that are not their fault?

Re:definition of purity

[silentcoder]

There is another factor - which is that wealth multiplies effect. I really spend my life trying to do good to other people, to uplift people, to help people, to empower people. You know what, all I've done pales into invisibility compared to what the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation has done - and I think Bill Gates is a terribly evil person, yet he has done more good in a year than I could achieve if I live to be a thousand.

Why ? Because he has far more financial resources at his disposal, which enables him to do good that affects far more people than I ever could.

But the same goes for evil. A crazy killer may poison a well, it takes a greedy corporation to poison an entire river and killed hundreds or thousands of innocent people downstream. A crazy, evil person may become a rapist killer. How many could victims can he conceivably affect ? Even the most successfull serial killers are in the low-twenties. Harold Shipman got (probably) around 300 but he was much richer than the average serial killer and his lucrative job also gave him very good cover to hide his crimes. But the vast majority don't even get to 5 - and that's serial killers (3 or more - the vast majority of potential serial killers are caught without ever becoming serial killers).
So a few tens of victims... maybe.
How many people have been killed by wall street corruption ? How many people took their own lives after a bank corruptly foreclosed on a house in a fraudulent matter ? There were millions of cases like that just in 2009, so it's inconceivable that the death toll is not at least in the thousands.
When Katrina hit New Orleans - how much worse was the outcomes made for poor people, when the insurance companies found a million reasons not to pay their claims ? Sure the insurance companies feared they'd be bankrupted... but that was their PURPOSE - that's what htose people paid them for ! The sole reason we tolerate their existence is so that, when a hurrican destroys people's homes THEY go bankrupt instead of those people. How many more died in that floodwater thanks to greed? There is overwhelming evidence that wealthy people got prioritized rescue and other advantages which ultimately made the death toll far higher than it otherwise would have been.

When the average person commits evil - it affects only a small number of people. When the extremely wealthy commit evil - thousands suffer. Their very wealth magnifies the effect of their actions.