Of course, you changed the hypothetical from the one I responded to: "pretty soon everyone will have to unlock their phone and hand it over to a customs agent while they're getting their passport swiped."
But in any event, it takes a fair amount of time to slurp tens of GB over a USB interface. Either your line starts to move at that rate, or you have banks of ports that you herd people up to. Then, once they're unsupervised, you have to trust them to plug in the right device and not a decoy (and to plug in all their devices if they have more than one), trust they're not running modded firmware that hides certain folders/data from the USB interface, and so on.
If something this draconian ever happens, you can come right back here and rub my face in it, and I'll cheerfully admit I was wrong (and will help lead the charge on a workaround). That's a completely safe offer on my part, because it won't happen.
As I said in the part of my post you didn't quote, "[t]his topic is definitely something we need to vigorously discuss." I actually agree with pretty much everything you said.
But that has nothing to do with my original point (clearly missed by reflexive mods) that spewing rhetorical nonsense like Larson is doing is unnecessary and counterproductive to a thoughtful, rational discussion about the subject.
so if it only happens to 1 in a 1000 people it's ok?
Yes, dear AC, if it happens due to some level of reasonable suspicion. I take it you would prefer a system where CBP has no authority to search anything under any circumstances? Hopefully you don't actually live in the U.S. and thus benefit from its protections as you sit in the comfort of your own home (ok, ok, or your parent's basement) and crank out ignorant anonymous posts.
If we do nothing to resist, pretty soon everyone will have to unlock their phone and hand it over to a customs agent while they're getting their passport swiped
Think about how much time and manpower that would take. Think about it. That's not going to happen.
This topic is definitely something we need to vigorously discuss, but giving airtime to over-the-top nonsense like this isn't the way to do it.
except that she 1) did so in her CNN contributor capacity (and got fired from it over), 2) it was a blatantly obvious question that anyone should have seen coming (Debate in Flint MI, gee, think they're gonna ask about the water crisis? Duh), and 3) CLINTON FLUBBED THE QUESTION ANYWAY
So it wasn't an attempt to steer the primary because 1) she had the foresight not to send it from her DNC email account, 2) it wasn't a very good idea, and 3) it didn't work very well? Come on.
You've a far better respect for the patent office than I if you think they wouldn't issue slightly different patents for more or less identical procedures
Of course they would, and have in the past. But that's perfectly consistent with what I said. The out and out prohibition is against two patents covering exactly the same thing. After that, it becomes a question of degree.
Not sure what you're talking about with Acacia -- they sue Microsoft all the time. And if IV happens to have any MS patents in its portfolio, they're certainly not included in the 10,000 referenced here.
IANAL, but if you claim that you're operating under licensed patent from MS, and the troll claims that you're violating their patent, don't they have to go fight MS now?
No. Different patents are legally required to cover different things, so the fact that one aspect of something I do might be covered by one of MS's patents has no bearing on whether a different aspect of it might be covered by the troll's patent.
The summary (as well as the cited article) gloms together two unrelated issues. The 10,000 patents have nothing to do with protection against patent trolls -- by definition, trolls typically don't have an active business and therefore there's nothing to infringe patents that a defendant might counter-assert.
The original MS blog post clearly separates the unlimited indemnification (useful for all patent suits, including troll suits) from access to the 10,000 patents (potentially useful for patent suits filed by real operating companies who might have products of their own that fall under MS's patents).
That said, I certainly don't want to spend a million dollars to convince a court of that, and even in the off chance that the judge finds this claim so bullshit that they award attorney's fees, this "Blackbird" company is probably nothing but a paper corporation with one patent, the PO box, and a google voice number, and spends 100% of the income on lawyer fees.
That's not necessarily as bulletproof of a position as it sounds anymore. Last month Judge Gilstrap in the Eastern District of Texas held the person behind the shell company behind the shell company that filed a frivolous case personally responsible for almost $500k the other side's attorney's fees, and even sanctioned the local attorney running the case $25k.
You have to meet all the major claims of the patent to be infringing, though, right?
You have to meet all the elements of at least one claim. Taking one of the broadest claims (claim 1) as an example, you would have to perform all the recited steps, and the computer would have to have all the recited modules/connection:
A computer-implemented method of digital data duplication comprising:
taking requests at one or more user interfaces;
transmitting said requests through a network to a computer;
assigning each of said requests to one of a plurality of output devices; and
executing the duplication process,
wherein said computer comprises:
at least one first module configured to create a task log based on incoming requests;
at least one second module configured to store all data necessary for executing said duplication process;
at least one third module configured to create a subset of said data stored in said second module, further configured to download said subset to one of said output devices, and further configured to command said output device to transfer said subset onto blank media; and
a connection through which said second module communicates with said first module and said third module
A dependent claim like claim 4 is by definition narrower than its parent claim -- a dependent claim must add at least one additional limitation. And someone can infringe one claim of a patent even if it doesn't infringe others. So whether Netflix does what claim 4 says is immaterial to whether it does what claim 1 says.
It may well be that some of the broader claims are more generic than the specific process described in the patent -- it's not unusual for a patent to have higher-level claims. (That said, if they're too high-level and/or the patentholder tries to stretch the claims to cover something too different than the original idea, they run the risk of being held invalid. It wouldn't surprise me if that's the outcome here.)
Avaya is probably 40-50% of the business phones out there and probably 90% of the phones used in call centers. There's no way they shouldn't be profitable.
And Vlasic had a huge percentage of the pickle market before it filed for bankruptcy. Market share by itself tells you nothing.
If a company signs a contract...they shouldn't be held to that contract?
Yup, just like if you sign a contract to work for an employer for a year for $50k, you should be held to that contract: $50k a year forever, and you can never leave.
> The only way... if the vast majority of patents they might assert in the future are Alice-susceptible
I wonder where you get that.
Mainly because that's the only factor that's out of the law firms' control. The rest is a series of deliberate decisions about how they conduct themselves during litigation, and the vast majority know how to keep themselves on the thick side of the ice in that regard. While the Supreme Court's Octane Fitness decision in 2014 arguably made it easier for a court to award attorney's fees, I strongly suspect fees would have been awarded in a case like this even under the old standard.
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.
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.
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.
Responsible management, union regulations, and OSHA largely make that impossible in the United States
I guess that depends on your definition of "largely" and "impossible." OSHA has a handy little database that reports a dozen aluminum dust explosions in the U.S. since 2000, with about half a dozen fatalities.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, you changed the hypothetical from the one I responded to: "pretty soon everyone will have to unlock their phone and hand it over to a customs agent while they're getting their passport swiped."
But in any event, it takes a fair amount of time to slurp tens of GB over a USB interface. Either your line starts to move at that rate, or you have banks of ports that you herd people up to. Then, once they're unsupervised, you have to trust them to plug in the right device and not a decoy (and to plug in all their devices if they have more than one), trust they're not running modded firmware that hides certain folders/data from the USB interface, and so on.
If something this draconian ever happens, you can come right back here and rub my face in it, and I'll cheerfully admit I was wrong (and will help lead the charge on a workaround). That's a completely safe offer on my part, because it won't happen.
As I said in the part of my post you didn't quote, "[t]his topic is definitely something we need to vigorously discuss." I actually agree with pretty much everything you said.
But that has nothing to do with my original point (clearly missed by reflexive mods) that spewing rhetorical nonsense like Larson is doing is unnecessary and counterproductive to a thoughtful, rational discussion about the subject.
so if it only happens to 1 in a 1000 people it's ok?
Yes, dear AC, if it happens due to some level of reasonable suspicion. I take it you would prefer a system where CBP has no authority to search anything under any circumstances? Hopefully you don't actually live in the U.S. and thus benefit from its protections as you sit in the comfort of your own home (ok, ok, or your parent's basement) and crank out ignorant anonymous posts.
Mod me down again, anarchists.
If we do nothing to resist, pretty soon everyone will have to unlock their phone and hand it over to a customs agent while they're getting their passport swiped
Think about how much time and manpower that would take. Think about it. That's not going to happen.
This topic is definitely something we need to vigorously discuss, but giving airtime to over-the-top nonsense like this isn't the way to do it.
Come on, Slashdot.
except that she 1) did so in her CNN contributor capacity (and got fired from it over), 2) it was a blatantly obvious question that anyone should have seen coming (Debate in Flint MI, gee, think they're gonna ask about the water crisis? Duh), and 3) CLINTON FLUBBED THE QUESTION ANYWAY
So it wasn't an attempt to steer the primary because 1) she had the foresight not to send it from her DNC email account, 2) it wasn't a very good idea, and 3) it didn't work very well? Come on.
And even putting all that aside, it was a pattern, not an isolated incident.
The only thing more frightening than the thought that Slashdot editors don't read summaries before they publish them is the thought that they do....
You've a far better respect for the patent office than I if you think they wouldn't issue slightly different patents for more or less identical procedures
Of course they would, and have in the past. But that's perfectly consistent with what I said. The out and out prohibition is against two patents covering exactly the same thing. After that, it becomes a question of degree.
the grid will have to adapt to the time-variable sources
Stubborn grid -- why can't it just go ahead and get its act together now?
Not sure what you're talking about with Acacia -- they sue Microsoft all the time. And if IV happens to have any MS patents in its portfolio, they're certainly not included in the 10,000 referenced here.
IANAL, but if you claim that you're operating under licensed patent from MS, and the troll claims that you're violating their patent, don't they have to go fight MS now?
No. Different patents are legally required to cover different things, so the fact that one aspect of something I do might be covered by one of MS's patents has no bearing on whether a different aspect of it might be covered by the troll's patent.
The summary (as well as the cited article) gloms together two unrelated issues. The 10,000 patents have nothing to do with protection against patent trolls -- by definition, trolls typically don't have an active business and therefore there's nothing to infringe patents that a defendant might counter-assert.
The original MS blog post clearly separates the unlimited indemnification (useful for all patent suits, including troll suits) from access to the 10,000 patents (potentially useful for patent suits filed by real operating companies who might have products of their own that fall under MS's patents).
Now there's some circular, utterly non-falsifiable reasoning. Who says climate change isn't a religion?
everything is caused by climate change
I'll be fascinated to learn how climate change caused you to post this utterly asinine comment.
That said, I certainly don't want to spend a million dollars to convince a court of that, and even in the off chance that the judge finds this claim so bullshit that they award attorney's fees, this "Blackbird" company is probably nothing but a paper corporation with one patent, the PO box, and a google voice number, and spends 100% of the income on lawyer fees.
That's not necessarily as bulletproof of a position as it sounds anymore. Last month Judge Gilstrap in the Eastern District of Texas held the person behind the shell company behind the shell company that filed a frivolous case personally responsible for almost $500k the other side's attorney's fees, and even sanctioned the local attorney running the case $25k.
He'll sign an executive order reaffirming 35 U.S.C. Section 103, you mean?
Your "simple rule" has been in force since 1952.
You have to meet all the major claims of the patent to be infringing, though, right?
You have to meet all the elements of at least one claim. Taking one of the broadest claims (claim 1) as an example, you would have to perform all the recited steps, and the computer would have to have all the recited modules/connection:
A computer-implemented method of digital data duplication comprising:
taking requests at one or more user interfaces;
transmitting said requests through a network to a computer;
assigning each of said requests to one of a plurality of output devices; and
executing the duplication process,
wherein said computer comprises:
at least one first module configured to create a task log based on incoming requests;
at least one second module configured to store all data necessary for executing said duplication process;
at least one third module configured to create a subset of said data stored in said second module, further configured to download said subset to one of said output devices, and further configured to command said output device to transfer said subset onto blank media; and
a connection through which said second module communicates with said first module and said third module
I for one appreciated the subtle humor. Most people probably won't dig enough to understand that the patent's priority date is late 2000....
A dependent claim like claim 4 is by definition narrower than its parent claim -- a dependent claim must add at least one additional limitation. And someone can infringe one claim of a patent even if it doesn't infringe others. So whether Netflix does what claim 4 says is immaterial to whether it does what claim 1 says.
It may well be that some of the broader claims are more generic than the specific process described in the patent -- it's not unusual for a patent to have higher-level claims. (That said, if they're too high-level and/or the patentholder tries to stretch the claims to cover something too different than the original idea, they run the risk of being held invalid. It wouldn't surprise me if that's the outcome here.)
Avaya is probably 40-50% of the business phones out there and probably 90% of the phones used in call centers. There's no way they shouldn't be profitable.
And Vlasic had a huge percentage of the pickle market before it filed for bankruptcy. Market share by itself tells you nothing.
Avaya was sitting on $6 billion in debt and most recently reported $58 million in quarterly profits. Do the math.
Moody's downgraded them twice last year, from nearly the junkiest of junky junk to something a bit junkier.
The only surprising thing is that they held off the inevitable as long as they did.
If a company signs a contract...they shouldn't be held to that contract?
Yup, just like if you sign a contract to work for an employer for a year for $50k, you should be held to that contract: $50k a year forever, and you can never leave.
Right?
> The only way ... if the vast majority of patents they might assert in the future are Alice-susceptible
I wonder where you get that.
Mainly because that's the only factor that's out of the law firms' control. The rest is a series of deliberate decisions about how they conduct themselves during litigation, and the vast majority know how to keep themselves on the thick side of the ice in that regard. While the Supreme Court's Octane Fitness decision in 2014 arguably made it easier for a court to award attorney's fees, I strongly suspect fees would have been awarded in a case like this even under the old standard.
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.
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.
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.
Responsible management, union regulations, and OSHA largely make that impossible in the United States
I guess that depends on your definition of "largely" and "impossible." OSHA has a handy little database that reports a dozen aluminum dust explosions in the U.S. since 2000, with about half a dozen fatalities.