Patent Trolls On the Run But Not Vanquished Yet 56
snydeq writes Strong legislation that will weaken the ability of the trolls to shake down innovators is likely to pass Congress, but more should be done, writes InfoWorld's Bill Snyder. "The Innovation Act isn't an ideal fix for the program patent system. But provisions in the proposed law, like one that will make trolls pay legal costs if their claims are rejected, will remove a good deal of the risk that smaller companies face when they decide to resist a spurious lawsuit," Snyder writes. That said, "You'd have to be wildly optimistic to think that software patents will be abolished. Although the EFF's proposals call for the idea to be studied, [EFF attorney Daniel] Nazer doesn't expect it to happen; he instead advocates several reforms not contained in the Innovation Act."
Really need to post information about the act (Score:4, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I... [wikipedia.org]
Also I would be very careful what you wish for here. Anybody who doesn't have the capital or desire to become a participating entity could be screwed over royally here.
It would be far better to take patent trials away from juries. Picking people at random and then pointing them at highly technical patents isn't something that even sounds like it might work.
Re: (Score:2)
Shopping around for juries and judges in rural areas is a big problem that should be addressed
Re:Really need to post information about the act (Score:5, Informative)
Shopping around for juries and judges in rural areas is a big problem that should be addressed
If it were that simple, the small player would have an equal chance.
The problem is there are some courts where the jury pool is populated by patent friendly people, some of which are not above going to great lengths to hide these facts during Voir dire. The Eastern District of Texas [arstechnica.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Are you suggesting the Marshall Texas, population 23,523, where the federal courthouse is located that is mentioned in your linked article is NOT a rural area?
Or perhaps having a mail-drop 'office' adjacent to the court house is not 'shopping' for a jury and judge...
Re: (Score:2)
Having just driven through Marshall yesterday I can attest that it's not some small city. I think that everybody expects that Wilmington, Delaware is the best venue? There's a reason that the Doubletree (closest to the Federal Courts) in Wilmington can charge an arm and a leg for rooms because just two blocks away is one of the the most dangerous areas of the city where every drug addict and homeless person within a 20 mile radius congregates daily. Given that or Marshall, I'll take Marshall.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You mean like Baltimore Big? Shit 1/2 of Baltimore is a burned out wreck. I'll take Texas any day even in itty bitty Marshall. Oh and about 20 miles away is Longview, over 80,000 people there. We're not in the sticks but we do have elbow room.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Shopping around for juries and judges in rural areas is a big problem that should be addressed
If it were that simple, the small player would have an equal chance.
The problem is there are some courts where the jury pool is populated by patent friendly people, some of which are not above going to great lengths to hide these facts during Voir dire. The Eastern District of Texas [arstechnica.com]
It isn't entirely that the juries are patent friendly. While you are far more likely to get a juror that actually holds (and understands the value of) intangible property in East Texas due to the widespread distribution of severed mineral and royalty rights, most East Texans don't care one way or another about patents. If you don't count general collegiality, there are three reasons the Eastern District is chosen for cases (not just patent cases, remember EDTEX was also the center for asbestos litigation)
Re: (Score:2)
So, you are claiming that a Kangaroo Court, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K... [wikipedia.org], that ignores judicial standards and rushes cases at the expense of the defendant is a good thing?
WTF, no wonder the patent trolls flock to it, Marshall Texas Kangaroo Courts have even been the subject of local hymnals, https://archive.org/details/IB... [archive.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Tomatoe/tomato, you say 'unique legal standards protected by Erie', I say bullshit local custom exploited by trolls
Not claiming that the juries are corrupt, just unsophisticated and willing to believe that some troll claiming to have 'invented' a technique that is disputed by prior art, that any person who has been using the internet for the past 2 decades, would recognized
Re:Really need to post information about the act (Score:4, Insightful)
"the court" brings nobody. It is up to each side to employ and bring in its own 'experts.'
That's one of the things that makes a defense so expensive. The plaintiff can promise a cut of the take, but the small respondent - so far - has no such resource.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You know what would be far better?
Making the patent office liable for passing overly-broad patents, which aren't actually innovations, and which simply fall into "a system and methodology for going something we've been doing in the real world for decades, but with a computer ".
Put some actual onus on the patent office to not simply be chimps who rubber stamp inventions and collect fees, and legal liability on patent applicants who basically play a shell game to essentially patent an idea and not an inventio
Re: (Score:1)
Just use a variant of the Donald Knuth reward check method. The first patent that gets invalidated will incur a 1 cent cut from the patent office budget. The second one a 2 cent cut, etc. After a few weeks the USPTA would have no option except shut down.
Re: (Score:1)
Not needed if you've ever heard of Donald Knuth's reward checks, something that I'd expect most Slashdot readers have.
Re:Really need to post information about the act (Score:4, Interesting)
My dad patented an oil field tool that relied on the magnetic properties of the drill pipe to perform its function.
Someone copied it and started selling it. My Dad sued.
During jury selection an officer of the Navy who specialized in detection and masking of submarines through magnetic means was dismissed from the pool by the defendants.
He knew too much about the key technology involved in the trial.
Re: (Score:3)
QA and the lack thereof! (Score:2, Offtopic)
I submitted a story and it was yanked, so I'll post in stories instead. Slashdot is once again broken. The top sentence of text in the majority of comments is clipped off so only about half the text is visible. The bottom sentence is spliced with the bottom links so you can't read those either. Buttons are almost all broken. Some buttons are not buttons at all, just text. Other buttons have the same text coloring as the button with maybe white shading?
How this could have ever gotten past QA is astoun
Update (Score:4, Informative)
I saw a message from Soulskill that they will work on the bugs tomorrow. Until then, an idea would be to pad your top and bottom lines with a line-break. It may help people to read your whole comment.. then again I don't know if they strip breaks on either end under certain conditions.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
Yeah, but /. already had a visually consistent website. They now broke it, in the most amateur way ever (well, again really). I've got people's signatures scrawled on top of the "Reply to This etc." links. I've list the sidebar on the front page.
Re: (Score:3)
All I want to know for now is: How do I get to more stories? Because at the moment I can't get to the "next" page at all. Don't even know where to look.
Maybe related: tags are invisible for me, so maybe the buttons are too (FF36).
Re: (Score:2)
The Older/Newer buttons broke with our code push yesterday (tags went into hiding, too). Hope to have them fixed soon. My apologies!
Until it's fixed, you can use this link as a workaround if you'd like: http://slashdot.org/?page=1 [slashdot.org]
If you increment the page number, you can see successive pages.
Re: (Score:2)
Sweet, thanks for the work and reply.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
There is always http://soylentnews.org/ [soylentnews.org] Formed by people sick of the nonsense that goes on here.
Re: (Score:1)
But offsetting that is most of the ACs stayed here, in the cesspool they created while running away from their reputation. You are what you wallow in.
Re: (Score:2)
Unlikely to make a big difference (Score:4, Interesting)
It will just change some of the risk profiles taken on by the trolls. In the end they are staffed by lawyers where as their targets have to retain a lawyer, so their targets have to fund their defence right from the beginning and hope to win to get their money back. What you will see is an increase in out of court settlements ie. we will stop litigating you if you agree to settle this now for no money out of court. This would be very very tempting option if you saw the likely hood of thousands and thousands of dollars of legal costs ahead.
Why not just eliminate trolling? (Score:1)
I don't understand why they can't just make trolling illegal. If a company wants to launch a lawsuit against another company for infringing a software patent, they should be required to have a current implementation of the patent in use by customers.
Software patent trolls seem so bad because they really are. Saying "I have an idea, I don't use it or won't ever use it, but noone else can use it" is illogical and it should be laughed out of court rooms.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Who pays costs now? (Score:2)
Do you mean to say that they are not required to pay their costs now ???!!! Thta's absolutely barmy. Who does pay?
Re: (Score:2)
Trolling is overly broad (Score:2)
The term Trolling is overly broad and implies that if you're a non-practicing entity (NPE) with a portfolio of patents that makes you a troll. With the advent of software patents this has brought more focus onto NPEs but they've been around for a very long time. [slate.com] The problem is that a lot of these patents are very, very vague or as has previously been pointed out, crafted by skilled lawyers to make something appear as "innovative" when it really is obvious. There in lies the crux of the matter, we have la
Re: (Score:2)
1) How? That's what the law says we're supposed to do now.
4) Juries should hear patent case appeals. But they should be qualified juries of peers, not J. Random Assholes.
5) You're calling for an end to capitalism. Me too! But realize that's what you're doing.
Most problems with patents could be solved by severely reducing their duration, especially software patents. The same is true of copyrights.
Re: (Score:2)
1) How? That's what the law says we're supposed to do now.
4) Juries should hear patent case appeals. But they should be qualified juries of peers, not J. Random Assholes.
5) You're calling for an end to capitalism. Me too! But realize that's what you're doing.
Most problems with patents could be solved by severely reducing their duration, especially software patents. The same is true of copyrights.
Yeah that needs to be changed. Legislation needs to be introduced to correct these problems. That's a tough political choice but inevitably capitalism succeeds by weeding out stupid patents more quickly or preventing them from being issued in the first place. Copyrights are another mess and the Sonny Bono legislation needs to be repealed. Considering how much Disney makes on their shit they need no protection.
Patents are racket. (Score:1)
Patents are racket. Human knowledge doubles every 12 months [industrytap.com], soon to be even shorter. So for every patent, on average the idea would be replicated independently in the first year. IF we needs patents, they should be valid at most for one cycle, and only if the requester can document that their development required several cycles, or a substantial monetary investment. One cycle should be ample time to recoup your investment, then make way for other innovators.
Nope! (Score:1)
Still not good enough. </troll>