RIAA will eventually pay if the judgment holds up on appeal. This enforcement of judgment business is typical and doesn't mean a huge corporation is being favored. The RIAA is claiming that it is planning to appeal and will not pay until after it has exhausted its appeals. In response, the defendant (or the Good Guy) wants RIAA to post a bond not only for the amount of the judgment but also for the expected costs of a failed appeal. They'll probably get interest and stuff, too, if the judgment is affirmed on appeal. This is both pretty standard procedure, except RIAA forgot to inform the Court of its intentions.
Key generators for all versions of Windows XP became prevalent soon after the product was released. There were complaints of genuine purchasers being flagged as pirates because the code in their boxed version of XP had been used by a key-genner.
How many of those codes are actually valid, genuine, and purchased?
Children get sick. Chicken pox takes about a week to run through. No, it's not life-threatening, but it's just not appropriate to leave a six-year-old at home, alone, unsupervised, with a fever, for a week. What would you propose a parent do? Presumably you paid your employees enough to hire a babysitter for 40 hours?
This may sound inhumane, but in general, your personal life is your problem. In particular, your children are your problem. Please hear me out first before you think I am flaming.
I make sacrifices to advance my career. It is unfair to let any of my equals match my advancement without requiring those same sacrifices of them. If I ignore my hypothetical chicken-pox-stricken child for a week to finish an urgent project, come payday, I deserve consideration over a comparable employee who took that week off to attend their child's piano recital. My co-worker is getting paid by his children's future affections for him. I should get paid my career advancement. Anything else would be un-American.
Feel free to question my life choices. My co-workers do so, even to my face. But when the big projects come down, I get the call first because the bosses know they will get quality work product from on time with no excuses, however reasonable they may be. If women as a group happen to be unwilling to make those sacrifices, it is entirely expected and fair that they do not advance in the workplace as far as those who make those sacrifices.
For instance, a female co-worker took four months off for maternity leave (three paid, one unpaid). I took her spot on an ongoing matter, which was widely considered one of the firm's most important accounts. The client was infamously demanding. I worked my ass off because I knew this would be a huge career boost. I ignored my girlfriend, parents, siblings, friends, and goldfish, all whom I am very affectionate towards, to get the job done. I pulled two months of sustained fourteen hour days and weekends -- and at one point, three straight days. At no point did my co-worker respond to any e-mails or other provide any aid towards recreating what she had done already because she "was on leave and bonding with her baby."
Near the end of the project, my co-worker returned and wanted her spot back, pursuant to the firm's policy on maternity leave. My boss called me in and told me I was going to be removed from the team. I yelled and cursed at him for about five minutes, and this guy was a mentor I idolized and respected. I calmed down, apologized, and asked him whether he thought that would be fair. I was haggard, had bags under my eyes, unshaved, unwashed, and wearing the same clothes even though the project had been completed for days at that point -- I had only slept, ate, and paid late bills in that time. He compromised and said that he'd keep us both on the team.
However, my co-worker was not up to speed on anything, and I was not about to help her after she had refused to e-mail me her draft of a brief, which I had to spend three straight days researching and rewriting from scratch. Moreover, the team realized that I may have been a screwed-up guy with screwed-up priorities, but they knew I was someone who could be trusted with work. My co-worker simply had priorities more important than work. She left the team, complained to everyone about the sexism and cronyism (magnified because I was close to the team leader), spread rumors about the kind of relationship I had with the boss, and eventually left the firm in a huge fireball. (Calling someone an "ass-kissing faggot" during a firm cocktail party is never a good idea, and probably will get you fired.)
Was this fair? I thought it was, and I still do. You may think it's sexism, but to me, it's only giving people their due.
The defendant is a nineteen year old immigrant who took 20 seconds of footage near the end of the movie with a Canon PowerShot CAMERA that happens to have limited video capability.
The judicial system of the United States gets cranky when defendants try to tamper with witnesses or jurors. Conspiring to tamper with an informant by arranging for her children to be threatened is a huge crime in the United States, and I think it's fair that it is so harshly punished. These crimes are against the fabric of the judicial system, and must be treated with efficiently.
Each of the smaller facilities require lots of overhead in terms of money and space for air conditioning, security guards, power generators, walls, fire control systems, UPS, etc. Once the systems were centralized, these expenses also became centralized. Thus, less space is required, costs go down, and everyone is happy.
On the other hand, Google has a market cap of 158.89 billion dollars. Sure, it's a lot lower than AT&T's market cap of 238.88 billion dollars, but Google spent a billion dollars on YOUTUBE! On YOUTUBE!
This is going to be on hell of a bidding war, I'll tell you that!
The town is rundown and the best hotel in town is a Holiday Inn Express.
But compared to the rest of the division, Tyler is apparently the richest. That's what the judge said. The other districts can't do patent law because they're too busy with immigration and criminal cases.
Kodak saved $1.8 BILLION dollars by hiring lawyers to conduct thorough reviews of the technology and patents.
If you willfully infringe someone's patent, you can get up to three times the damages you incurred. This is to dissuade people from knowingly and intentionally infringing on someone's patent and simply paying actual damages. (This would be a kind of forced royalty.) Having attorneys analyze your product, search for relevant patents, and study both then swear up and down you do not infringe argues against willful infringement.
Kodak's attorneys were wrong when they said the products didn't infringe, but they conducted a thorough review in good faith. The court found that Polaroid was not entitled to treble damages on these facts because there was no showing of willful infringement.
Up until 2004, failure to obtain opinion of counsel was a sign that you willfully infringed a patent you knew about. Now the lack of an opinion of counsel is just a sign you willfully infringed.
The Eastern District of Texas not only has a rocket docket, but also Local Patent Rules. These rules combine to place huge discovery obligations. Patent plaintiffs love to sue there because Tyler residents make up the jury pool are rich from oil rights, and oil royalties. They love their abstract property rights. (A sitting judge on the E.D. Tex. said this two months ago, so don't shoot the messenger.) The discovery obligations also allow for a lot of fishing expeditions. The judge basically forces the parties to settle by refusing to deal with discovery disputes or threatening to make draconian decisions if he has to rule on them. Failures to comply with discovery can lose the case for you in Texas. A judge recently threw out an alleged infringer's defense because the lawyers forgot to disclose a testing document.
All these factors mean that most cases that go to verdict are for the plaintiffs. Most people settle because it's better to choose your own poison than to have a judge and jury who know nothing about technology or the patent law decide the fate of your company.
In its heyday, IBM had a reputation for being a tough patent troll. There is an apocryphal story where IBM blue suits go over to Sun and presents how a Sun product was infringing an IBM patent, and a license would cost only $x million. After the IBM presentation was over, the Sun engineers go up and rip apart the IBM claim charts, and showed that the patents were not infringed.
The blue suits stand up and say, "Well, we can go back to our vault and find another patent."
Sun took out a license.
Moral of the Story: Walking up to IBM and suing them for patent infringement is a dumb idea.
The upshot of Mercexchange v. eBay is that patent-owners who do not manufacture or sell a product are going to have a hard time obtaining injunctive relief against infringers, alleged and otherwise. The fact that this company sells products it claims practice the patents in suit is crucial because the company has a good argument for shutting down Sony's sales of the Cell. RIM, of Blackberry fame, can attest to the strength of such a threat. NTP was able to get a $612 million settlement after threatening to shut down Blackberry service in the United States.
Just great. So while we're censoring every form of art, how about Michelangelo's statue? Someone needs to put some leaves there. Oh, is that a breast on that artwork? Better get the censor bars out.
"In 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft objected to photographers taking pictures of him in front two statues, one of which has an exposed aluminum breast (the female statue goes by the name, Spirit of Justice and also colloquially referred to as Minnie Lou) in the Justice Department building's Great Hall. He ordered to have the statues covered with draperies (although he now denies he made the order, he would have had to approve the order). Actually I prefer looking at aluminum breasts rather than Ashcroft's ugly mug, don't you? What got achieved in all this commotion? It made Ashcroft look like a prude, a throwback to the Victorian age, and it censored a very respectable piece of mediocre art."
By law, each patent can only patent one invention. When someone creates a product, they might file a patent application and find out there are multiple aspects of their product that are each novel. So they get continuations where most of the text of the patents are the same, but where different aspects or components are actually being claimed (patented).
With this system, you can vaporize the RPG and the insurgent who is shooting at you. There's no reason aside from "moral"* ones that prevent this from being pointed at ground targets.
* Geneva Convention prevents us from blinding people on purpose, and the reflected/scattered light from this laser tends to blind innocent bystanders.
Becoming a patent examiner in European countries is a great career choice. In the United States, a patent examiner is a job a science graduate gets while waiting for a better one. The pay is much lower, and people really take the job for the health benefits while searching for a better-paying job.
If you want to compete for the smartest people in the United States, you have to pay them more.
Spying with squirrels and small animals would be great if you can actually do it. Two words: plausible deniability. Even if your targets capture your squirrely assets, the technology aboard the animal is not a huge wash, and probably is not so special it has to be from the United States. You do lose a trained squirrel, however. If you could get a squirrel to enter a house and just sit there, you can effectively bug a house. With the GPS gear, you can figure out whether you're bugging the right house. If you hear conversations about insurgencies, and killing Americans, and stuff, then you can send a GPS-guided JDAM bomb right through the window.
But if your target complains about being spied on by a trained squirrel, people will laugh at them for being paranoids.
Obviously, you cannot conspire with yourself. Microsoft is a legal entity, but you can't accuse of it "conspiring" with its employees and directors because they are part of the legal entity.
The rest of the article is filled with FUD, too. Mail fraud does not include e-mail.
Why the anti-Americanism? They created GPS as a purely military aspect and probably didn't foresee the civilian uses of the system. The American military was worried that a rogue nation could guide cruise missiles using GPS. You see, up until then, cruise missiles needed sophisticated inertial guidance systems and terrain recognition systems to navigate. The American military was worried that GPS would allow accurate and directed cruise missiles to proliferate.
The United States figured out how to degrade the accuracy of the civilian signal in selected areas. Once this capability was obtained, the intentional error introduced to the civilian signal was set to zero.
The military already has lots of things that go boom. The Reaper just makes things simpler. When our military makes things simpler, then more American soldiers come home alive. I may disagree with the politics of war, but if this system gets a few more Americans out of harm's way, I'm all for it. Don't be naive enough to believe that Americans dying will somehow stimulate the government to stop fighting.
Anyway, the improved Reapers will be able to patrol the roads at night and target those planting IEDs. That makes roads safer, too.
Reapers will be deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. If the enemies there had SAMs, they would be shooting down a lot of Predators already.
Also, most man-portable SAMs are heat-guided. A Reaper has its engine and exhaust vents on top of the ship and flies at 50,000 ft, so it would be resistant to heat-guided SAMs. It doesn't travel fast enough to heat up the leading winig edges. I bet it's stealthier than you might think.
The judge wrote in his opinion that the attorneys for the defendant made mistakes and should not be able to benefit from their incompetence. That's as strongly worded as decisions get.
The point remains that these charges may be sane for a corporate client, but a client like the defendant probably would not be charged these fees.
Now the decision and order has loaded, it seems that the defendant and her attorneys engaged in gamesmanship and got caught by the judge.
The defendant's attorneys charged for costs associated with answering e-mails, phone calls, and leaving voice mails. He also billed the same work twice by having two attorneys attend the same motion hearings. The Court got real pissy and took away some hours that it thought were due to the incompetence of the defendant's attorneys resulting in things having to be done twice.
Most tellingly, the Court was annoyed that half of the attorneys fees demanded were incurred after the defendant had been declared the victor and had already initially filed for attorneys fees. It seemed that the defendants/his attorneys belatedly realized that they were going to file for fees and had to rack up the hours. The Court found that there was an "increased, almost frenetic activity on the part of counsel for the defendant after it was determined that Defendant was the prevailing party" and was thereby eligible for attorneys fees.
And the defendant's attorney was trying to get away with $1.50 for each photocopied page. The Court granted them $.20. Kinko's charges $0.02.
So it sounds like I was right -- the defendant's attorney was running up the fee request by asking for things that no sane client would ever pay, and no sane attorney would ever ask from a real-life paying customer.
Slashdot Mirror
RIAA will eventually pay if the judgment holds up on appeal. This enforcement of judgment business is typical and doesn't mean a huge corporation is being favored. The RIAA is claiming that it is planning to appeal and will not pay until after it has exhausted its appeals. In response, the defendant (or the Good Guy) wants RIAA to post a bond not only for the amount of the judgment but also for the expected costs of a failed appeal. They'll probably get interest and stuff, too, if the judgment is affirmed on appeal. This is both pretty standard procedure, except RIAA forgot to inform the Court of its intentions.
Key generators for all versions of Windows XP became prevalent soon after the product was released. There were complaints of genuine purchasers being flagged as pirates because the code in their boxed version of XP had been used by a key-genner.
How many of those codes are actually valid, genuine, and purchased?
The case was already packed with attorneys, and there was no help forthcoming.
This may sound inhumane, but in general, your personal life is your problem. In particular, your children are your problem. Please hear me out first before you think I am flaming.
I make sacrifices to advance my career. It is unfair to let any of my equals match my advancement without requiring those same sacrifices of them. If I ignore my hypothetical chicken-pox-stricken child for a week to finish an urgent project, come payday, I deserve consideration over a comparable employee who took that week off to attend their child's piano recital. My co-worker is getting paid by his children's future affections for him. I should get paid my career advancement. Anything else would be un-American.
Feel free to question my life choices. My co-workers do so, even to my face. But when the big projects come down, I get the call first because the bosses know they will get quality work product from on time with no excuses, however reasonable they may be. If women as a group happen to be unwilling to make those sacrifices, it is entirely expected and fair that they do not advance in the workplace as far as those who make those sacrifices.
For instance, a female co-worker took four months off for maternity leave (three paid, one unpaid). I took her spot on an ongoing matter, which was widely considered one of the firm's most important accounts. The client was infamously demanding. I worked my ass off because I knew this would be a huge career boost. I ignored my girlfriend, parents, siblings, friends, and goldfish, all whom I am very affectionate towards, to get the job done. I pulled two months of sustained fourteen hour days and weekends -- and at one point, three straight days. At no point did my co-worker respond to any e-mails or other provide any aid towards recreating what she had done already because she "was on leave and bonding with her baby."
Near the end of the project, my co-worker returned and wanted her spot back, pursuant to the firm's policy on maternity leave. My boss called me in and told me I was going to be removed from the team. I yelled and cursed at him for about five minutes, and this guy was a mentor I idolized and respected. I calmed down, apologized, and asked him whether he thought that would be fair. I was haggard, had bags under my eyes, unshaved, unwashed, and wearing the same clothes even though the project had been completed for days at that point -- I had only slept, ate, and paid late bills in that time. He compromised and said that he'd keep us both on the team.
However, my co-worker was not up to speed on anything, and I was not about to help her after she had refused to e-mail me her draft of a brief, which I had to spend three straight days researching and rewriting from scratch. Moreover, the team realized that I may have been a screwed-up guy with screwed-up priorities, but they knew I was someone who could be trusted with work. My co-worker simply had priorities more important than work. She left the team, complained to everyone about the sexism and cronyism (magnified because I was close to the team leader), spread rumors about the kind of relationship I had with the boss, and eventually left the firm in a huge fireball. (Calling someone an "ass-kissing faggot" during a firm cocktail party is never a good idea, and probably will get you fired.)
Was this fair? I thought it was, and I still do. You may think it's sexism, but to me, it's only giving people their due.
The defendant is a nineteen year old immigrant who took 20 seconds of footage near the end of the movie with a Canon PowerShot CAMERA that happens to have limited video capability.
She was not pirating movies.
The judicial system of the United States gets cranky when defendants try to tamper with witnesses or jurors. Conspiring to tamper with an informant by arranging for her children to be threatened is a huge crime in the United States, and I think it's fair that it is so harshly punished. These crimes are against the fabric of the judicial system, and must be treated with efficiently.
Each of the smaller facilities require lots of overhead in terms of money and space for air conditioning, security guards, power generators, walls, fire control systems, UPS, etc. Once the systems were centralized, these expenses also became centralized. Thus, less space is required, costs go down, and everyone is happy.
On the other hand, Google has a market cap of 158.89 billion dollars. Sure, it's a lot lower than AT&T's market cap of 238.88 billion dollars, but Google spent a billion dollars on YOUTUBE! On YOUTUBE!
This is going to be on hell of a bidding war, I'll tell you that!
The town is rundown and the best hotel in town is a Holiday Inn Express.
But compared to the rest of the division, Tyler is apparently the richest. That's what the judge said. The other districts can't do patent law because they're too busy with immigration and criminal cases.
Kodak saved $1.8 BILLION dollars by hiring lawyers to conduct thorough reviews of the technology and patents.
t p%3A%2F%2Fwww.mmmlaw.com%2Farticles%2Farticle_234. pdf&ei=36WvRun2MYKceaCbyYQG&usg=AFQjCNElqULOs3YimA zIWiRf3e-WS0LrKw&sig2=QptmOxEHX6EUKFrrG3RvYQ
If you willfully infringe someone's patent, you can get up to three times the damages you incurred. This is to dissuade people from knowingly and intentionally infringing on someone's patent and simply paying actual damages. (This would be a kind of forced royalty.) Having attorneys analyze your product, search for relevant patents, and study both then swear up and down you do not infringe argues against willful infringement.
Kodak's attorneys were wrong when they said the products didn't infringe, but they conducted a thorough review in good faith. The court found that Polaroid was not entitled to treble damages on these facts because there was no showing of willful infringement.
Up until 2004, failure to obtain opinion of counsel was a sign that you willfully infringed a patent you knew about. Now the lack of an opinion of counsel is just a sign you willfully infringed.
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=1&url=ht
The Eastern District of Texas not only has a rocket docket, but also Local Patent Rules. These rules combine to place huge discovery obligations. Patent plaintiffs love to sue there because Tyler residents make up the jury pool are rich from oil rights, and oil royalties. They love their abstract property rights. (A sitting judge on the E.D. Tex. said this two months ago, so don't shoot the messenger.) The discovery obligations also allow for a lot of fishing expeditions. The judge basically forces the parties to settle by refusing to deal with discovery disputes or threatening to make draconian decisions if he has to rule on them. Failures to comply with discovery can lose the case for you in Texas. A judge recently threw out an alleged infringer's defense because the lawyers forgot to disclose a testing document.
All these factors mean that most cases that go to verdict are for the plaintiffs. Most people settle because it's better to choose your own poison than to have a judge and jury who know nothing about technology or the patent law decide the fate of your company.
In its heyday, IBM had a reputation for being a tough patent troll. There is an apocryphal story where IBM blue suits go over to Sun and presents how a Sun product was infringing an IBM patent, and a license would cost only $x million. After the IBM presentation was over, the Sun engineers go up and rip apart the IBM claim charts, and showed that the patents were not infringed.
The blue suits stand up and say, "Well, we can go back to our vault and find another patent."
Sun took out a license.
Moral of the Story: Walking up to IBM and suing them for patent infringement is a dumb idea.
The upshot of Mercexchange v. eBay is that patent-owners who do not manufacture or sell a product are going to have a hard time obtaining injunctive relief against infringers, alleged and otherwise. The fact that this company sells products it claims practice the patents in suit is crucial because the company has a good argument for shutting down Sony's sales of the Cell. RIM, of Blackberry fame, can attest to the strength of such a threat. NTP was able to get a $612 million settlement after threatening to shut down Blackberry service in the United States.
From the Google:
"In 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft objected to photographers taking pictures of him in front two statues, one of which has an exposed aluminum breast (the female statue goes by the name, Spirit of Justice and also colloquially referred to as Minnie Lou) in the Justice Department building's Great Hall. He ordered to have the statues covered with draperies (although he now denies he made the order, he would have had to approve the order). Actually I prefer looking at aluminum breasts rather than Ashcroft's ugly mug, don't you? What got achieved in all this commotion? It made Ashcroft look like a prude, a throwback to the Victorian age, and it censored a very respectable piece of mediocre art."
I would kill to play as Sylar. So I can kill some more Heroes, I guess. The cheerleader annoys me so I hope you are allowed to kill her.
By law, each patent can only patent one invention. When someone creates a product, they might file a patent application and find out there are multiple aspects of their product that are each novel. So they get continuations where most of the text of the patents are the same, but where different aspects or components are actually being claimed (patented).
With this system, you can vaporize the RPG and the insurgent who is shooting at you. There's no reason aside from "moral"* ones that prevent this from being pointed at ground targets.
* Geneva Convention prevents us from blinding people on purpose, and the reflected/scattered light from this laser tends to blind innocent bystanders.
Becoming a patent examiner in European countries is a great career choice. In the United States, a patent examiner is a job a science graduate gets while waiting for a better one. The pay is much lower, and people really take the job for the health benefits while searching for a better-paying job.
If you want to compete for the smartest people in the United States, you have to pay them more.
Spying with squirrels and small animals would be great if you can actually do it. Two words: plausible deniability. Even if your targets capture your squirrely assets, the technology aboard the animal is not a huge wash, and probably is not so special it has to be from the United States. You do lose a trained squirrel, however. If you could get a squirrel to enter a house and just sit there, you can effectively bug a house. With the GPS gear, you can figure out whether you're bugging the right house. If you hear conversations about insurgencies, and killing Americans, and stuff, then you can send a GPS-guided JDAM bomb right through the window.
But if your target complains about being spied on by a trained squirrel, people will laugh at them for being paranoids.
Obviously, you cannot conspire with yourself. Microsoft is a legal entity, but you can't accuse of it "conspiring" with its employees and directors because they are part of the legal entity.
The rest of the article is filled with FUD, too. Mail fraud does not include e-mail.
Why the anti-Americanism? They created GPS as a purely military aspect and probably didn't foresee the civilian uses of the system. The American military was worried that a rogue nation could guide cruise missiles using GPS. You see, up until then, cruise missiles needed sophisticated inertial guidance systems and terrain recognition systems to navigate. The American military was worried that GPS would allow accurate and directed cruise missiles to proliferate.
The United States figured out how to degrade the accuracy of the civilian signal in selected areas. Once this capability was obtained, the intentional error introduced to the civilian signal was set to zero.
The military already has lots of things that go boom. The Reaper just makes things simpler. When our military makes things simpler, then more American soldiers come home alive. I may disagree with the politics of war, but if this system gets a few more Americans out of harm's way, I'm all for it. Don't be naive enough to believe that Americans dying will somehow stimulate the government to stop fighting.
Anyway, the improved Reapers will be able to patrol the roads at night and target those planting IEDs. That makes roads safer, too.
Reapers will be deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. If the enemies there had SAMs, they would be shooting down a lot of Predators already.
Also, most man-portable SAMs are heat-guided. A Reaper has its engine and exhaust vents on top of the ship and flies at 50,000 ft, so it would be resistant to heat-guided SAMs. It doesn't travel fast enough to heat up the leading winig edges. I bet it's stealthier than you might think.
The judge wrote in his opinion that the attorneys for the defendant made mistakes and should not be able to benefit from their incompetence. That's as strongly worded as decisions get.
The point remains that these charges may be sane for a corporate client, but a client like the defendant probably would not be charged these fees.
Now the decision and order has loaded, it seems that the defendant and her attorneys engaged in gamesmanship and got caught by the judge.
The defendant's attorneys charged for costs associated with answering e-mails, phone calls, and leaving voice mails. He also billed the same work twice by having two attorneys attend the same motion hearings. The Court got real pissy and took away some hours that it thought were due to the incompetence of the defendant's attorneys resulting in things having to be done twice.
Most tellingly, the Court was annoyed that half of the attorneys fees demanded were incurred after the defendant had been declared the victor and had already initially filed for attorneys fees. It seemed that the defendants/his attorneys belatedly realized that they were going to file for fees and had to rack up the hours. The Court found that there was an "increased, almost frenetic activity on the part of counsel for the defendant after it was determined that Defendant was the prevailing party" and was thereby eligible for attorneys fees.
And the defendant's attorney was trying to get away with $1.50 for each photocopied page. The Court granted them $.20. Kinko's charges $0.02.
So it sounds like I was right -- the defendant's attorney was running up the fee request by asking for things that no sane client would ever pay, and no sane attorney would ever ask from a real-life paying customer.