Supreme Court Rules In Favor of Patent Troll 87
An anonymous reader writes: The Supreme Court ruled today (PDF) that Cisco Systems can't skip out of a patent suit against them from patent troll Commil USA. The case reached the Supreme Court because Cisco argued it had a "good faith belief" that the patent they were infringing was invalid. The justices voted 6-2 that such a belief didn't matter if they were indeed infringing. The Supreme Court's opinion is that a company must know of the patent it's infringing, and that their product infringes upon the patent — which, at least, is more than what Commil was pushing.
The case isn't completely over — a $63.7 million verdict in Commil's favor was overturned by an Appeals Court, and now the Supreme Court has sent it back down for re-evaluation after it clarified the rules of infringement. The Appeals Court could still overturn the judgment for some other reason. The good news is that the Supreme Court dedicated a page in their opinion to telling lower courts how to sanction patent trolls and keep them from clogging the courts with ridiculous claims. "[I]t is still necessary and proper to stress that district courts have the authority and responsibility to ensure frivolous cases are dissuaded."
The case isn't completely over — a $63.7 million verdict in Commil's favor was overturned by an Appeals Court, and now the Supreme Court has sent it back down for re-evaluation after it clarified the rules of infringement. The Appeals Court could still overturn the judgment for some other reason. The good news is that the Supreme Court dedicated a page in their opinion to telling lower courts how to sanction patent trolls and keep them from clogging the courts with ridiculous claims. "[I]t is still necessary and proper to stress that district courts have the authority and responsibility to ensure frivolous cases are dissuaded."
Win some, Lose some (Score:3, Insightful)
All big IT companies are patent trolls.
Time to review the whole thing...
Re:Win some, Lose some (Score:5, Insightful)
Declaring a patent invalid yourself and trying to do the courts job pretty much guarantees you end up in the "lose some" catagory.
Re:Win some, Lose some (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Win some, Lose some (Score:4, Funny)
At first I read that as "What if you empty a patent attorney" and was thinking: Is it possible to make a patent attorney poor right now?
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Billions of dollars in legal fees is a small price to pay to protect the little guy....
Re: Win some, Lose some (Score:4, Insightful)
No it didn't. In the case of electricity in particular what it did was to ensure that the person responsible for the design of our transmission systems died poor while people who didn't invent that stuff got to 'own' it and thus got very rich.
In other words, patents favored those with business and legal knowledge as opposed to those who actually know how to do something useful. As they always have.
Re:View from a patent holder ... (Score:4, Interesting)
This is a very subjective matter -- what one considers a valid patent, another considers it obvious and invalid patent.
Instead of courts attacking patent holders (trolls), the USPTO should set clear guidelines as to what is patentable and what is not. Once they invalidate patents that have obvious claims, the trolling and racketeering will end. This is not an easy task (determining obvious vs non-obvious claims), but it must be done.
Re:View from a patent holder ... (Score:5, Interesting)
To me there is a much easier fix. Remove the assumption that patents reviewed by the USPTO are valid since a vast number have been proven to not be. That will shift the burden of proving validity to the patent holder making it less profitable for patent trolls.
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That's a good idea although it makes the patent holder wonder what he paid all that attorney, filing and maintenance fees for if it turns out his patent is invalid, years after being accepted.
But you're right, since the USPTO can't afford to spend too much time researching all the patent claims, the person being sued for infringement should have the right to prove that some or many claims in the patent are trivial, obvious or frivolous and therefore, invalid.
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As it is, we already try the validity of a patent (along with noninfringement, inequitable conduct, anti-trust, etc) in pretty much every patent case. And it only takes one
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Given how bad many issued patents are, I feel that it's the presumption of validity that is the mistake. And that the baby being thrown out is a baby predator...which we would be vastly better off if it were killed.
There actually *is* a good case to be made for certain patents, but for such a small percentage that with the current system even eliminating all patents would be a net gain.
Re:View from a patent holder ...u (Score:2)
Again, I think changing the legal standard would have much more drastic consequences than people understand. But strong post-grant processes can go a long way toward killing the ridiculous patents that we all rail against.
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Every time the USPTO tries what you suggest they get sued by every applicant and quickly exhaust their entire budget in legal fees. Congress wouldn't provide additional money for a legal defense fund so they just started approving basically everything.
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Slashdot Headline Poisoning claims another victim.
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The patent itself is worthless to find any basic, quick facts, for that matter.
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The patent is from 2001 and seems to detail some kind of cell phone system, which was invented many years before. But it is on a LAN!
So this is a patent for a micro/femtocell tower setup that can hook to a PBX, or the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). Not exactly novel, and not exactly non obvious, even in 2001.
the"know of" + "and that" things. (Score:2)
Court Rules in Favor of Patent Reform (Score:5, Interesting)
At some point, the trolls will collect enough tolls that we'll finally have to do something about the ridiculous patents that are granted.
Remember, the trolls are legally in the right, which makes it not a problem with bad ethics on the part of the trolls, but bad ethics on the part of our legal system or patent system.
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legal != ethical
Re:Court Rules in Favor of Patent Reform (Score:5, Insightful)
legal != ethical
The real problem is when something profitable and unethical is legally protected.
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Is Commil's patent "ridiculous"?
At first glance, it seems like a list of obvious features.
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Yes.
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However, I agree with Supreme Court that "good faith" is not enough to be a valid defense. This is Cisco after all, they will lie, cheat, and steal just as much as patent trolls. Give them a free pass of "oh, that didn't sound like a valid patent, so we just ignored them" and then pretty soon that excuse gets used for everything.
Re:Court Rules in Favor of Patent Reform (Score:4, Interesting)
We have to get off this stupid idea that inventors are unique snowflakes who invent unique stuff that nobody else could ever discover and we therefore owe them. The default position should be that a patent is probably invalid, and it should be up to the patent holder to prove otherwise, or pay costs trying. Also, examiners who grant invalid patents should be penalized. The chilling effect of patents and the amount of money being wasted and the lost opportunity costs on the economy are stifling.
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Do you have solid proof lots of people can come up with the same patented idea?
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At some point, the trolls will collect enough tolls that we'll finally have to do something about the ridiculous patents that are granted.
Remember, the trolls are legally in the right, which makes it not a problem with bad ethics on the part of the trolls, but bad ethics on the part of our legal system or patent system.
That's what they said about lawyers and politicians, and look what happened.
I don't understand Scalia's logic here. (Score:5, Insightful)
The logic the majority used in ruling on this case seems pretty simple (unless I'm totally off): the patent troll had a patent that was still legally valid because there had been no court challenge to declare it invalid. Because the patent was still legally valid, the infringement of the patent is still a valid cause of action in a lawsuit.
Scalia's logic is that you can bypass a legal challenge over a patent that might be ruled invalid in court because it was never valid in the first place. The question is, though, how would you know whether the patent is valid without the court saying so?
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The logic is simple: The patent troll MIGHT have a valid argument, therefore Cisco MUST reasonably respond.
Re:I don't understand Scalia's logic here. (Score:5, Informative)
The logic the majority used in ruling on this case seems pretty simple (unless I'm totally off): the patent troll had a patent that was still legally valid because there had been no court challenge to declare it invalid. Because the patent was still legally valid, the infringement of the patent is still a valid cause of action in a lawsuit.
Scalia's logic is that you can bypass a legal challenge over a patent that might be ruled invalid in court because it was never valid in the first place. The question is, though, how would you know whether the patent is valid without the court saying so?
But there are two separate types of infringement at issue here. First is direct infringement. This occurs when the defendant actually violated the patent him or herself. This is a strict liability offense, meaning that it doesn't matter if the defendant was aware of the patent or not, and it doesn't matter if the defendant was aware that his or her actions infringed the patent or not. And if the patent has not been declared invalid, it is presumed valid and the defendant is liable for damages even if the patent is later ruled invalid. This is well-established law and is not at issue in the Supreme Court's decision.
The other type of infringement is induced infringement. This occurs, for example when a defendant sells a product which would cause the end users to violate the patent. The defendant is not violating the patent directly. According to patent law, for a defendant to be liable for induced infringement, he or she must be aware of the patent and also aware that the usage of the product would be a violation of that patent. So the question before the Supreme Court was in the case of induced infringement, what if the defendant had a good faith reason to believe the patent to be invalid? I tend to agree with the majority here: if the patent wasn't declared invalid by a court, the usage of product would be infringing, so the defendant must have known that such usage would be infringing, since they knew of the patent. The dissenters (Scalia and Ch. J. Roberts) thought otherwise: if a patent is invalid, how can the defendant believe it to be infringed?
Re:I don't understand Scalia's logic here. (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, okay. Thanks for clearing that up for me, makes a lot more sense now.
Re:I don't understand Scalia's logic here. (Score:5, Informative)
So the question before the Supreme Court was in the case of induced infringement, what if the defendant had a good faith reason to believe the patent to be invalid? I tend to agree with the majority here: if the patent wasn't declared invalid by a court, the usage of product would be infringing, so the defendant must have known that such usage would be infringing, since they knew of the patent. The dissenters (Scalia and Ch. J. Roberts) thought otherwise: if a patent is invalid, how can the defendant believe it to be infringed?
Add to this the fact that the "good faith belief" is a really low bar, and simply means you found an amenable patent attorney to draft an invalidity opinion letter for you. If they're right, the patent is invalid and you owe nothing. If they're wrong - under the previous state of the law - you believed it was invalid and didn't intend to infringe and owe nothing.
Which basically boils down to, "pay an attorney $10k for an opinion memo, and get out of infringement scot free." It's a good loophole to close.
Disclaimer: I am a patent attorney and have done opinion letters. Mine were totally legit, though.
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I am a patent attorney and have done opinion letters. Mine were totally legit, though.
So do you look forward to hell? Or are you an Atheist? I don't get it.
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Trivially wrong. And I'm surprised you haven't thought about this. There are criteria for a patent to be valid. Some criteria are hard to judge, and need a court to decide. Some are easy. For example, actual prio
Thomas didn't vote with Scalia? (Score:2)
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It does happen, but it's not common. They end up on opposite sides of the judgment about 5% of the time. If you exclude unanimous cases, it's about 16% of the time.
http://sblog.s3.amazonaws.com/... [amazonaws.com]
just to deconstruct this (Score:1)
It seems like the owners of the patent are called "trolls" in this case because they don't manufacture anything; I didn't see anything from the news coverage about whether the patent itself is strong.
Furthermore, the patent itself has been upheld and Cisco has been found infringing. The only issue surrounds "inducement to infringe", meaning whether Cisco intended to get other people to infringe as well. That's a legalistic detail; even if the "trolls" lose the case on induced infringement, they still have a
Trolls serve a purpose. (Score:3)
First off I think all Intellectual monopoly will go away in the next few decades because it will prove to be unworkable.
But if you are going to have this stupid system patent trolls serve an important purpose. They buy up patents from small inventors and in return provide the legal firepower the small inventors don't have.
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Just a few seconds of research told me that patents have been in use for 565 years. [wikipedia.org] I find it hard to believe that they would have lasted that long if they were as unworkable as you say. Maybe, just maybe, there's a good reason that they've worked for so long especially when you consider that they only grant a temporary, non-renewable monopoly.
Re:Trolls serve a purpose. (Score:4, Insightful)
Slavery, monarchy, and arranged marriages were much older institutions that ended. Just because something is old doesn't mean it will survive. Patents and copyrights were easy to control when innovation was slow and capital intensive. Today tools for creation and copying are cheap so innovation is widespread. This will only increase. These monopolies will end because they will not be economical.
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Big LOL on equating slavery to patent rights. The patent holders are the ones getting screwed by a tiny amount of monopoly time granted to make money off their invention -- just 20 years. If you subtract the time taken from patent filing date to bringing the product to market, including marketing, say 4-5 years, the monopoly is only for 15 years. And the first 3-5 years, you won't have much sales because nobody has heard of y
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Or not, since they all still exist in the world today.
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Good point. Should have added "in civilized countries".
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I wouldn't be so sure that IP will evaporate -- the US Fed. government is still economically powerful, but having decided to allow offshoring of most work, there isn't much left for America aside from focusing on a patent-troll/RIAA-ish economy. I'm guessing it will use its economic and military power (both the local military called police, and the foreign military branches) to push IP rights along for decades to come, because that is what the people who finance elections want.
The patent trolls need to win (Score:5, Interesting)
The patent trolls need to win until corporations break, only then will real change in patent laws occur in the legislature.
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I assume powerful lobbyists will want to corporations to continue to profit. A handful of law firms in the business of litigation is hopefully not a powerful lobby compared to hundreds of billion dollar technology companies.
Wrong about the little guy (Score:1)
patent trolls to this day mostly impact large companies who are patent trolls themselves.
Tell that to all the mobile app developers who've been targeted. In fact, because of the way the law works, it's often more profitable to go after lots of smaller targets for quick settlements which can have them paying royalties well past the patent's expiration date than it is to go after just a few large targets who can fight back with lengthy litigation and in the process disqualify you from going after those smaller targets after the verdict is in.
Rackspace fights patent troll in the name of every mob [gigaom.com]
Then let us sue the government! (Score:5, Insightful)
It is absurd that the USPTO has a massive backlog on patent issuance -- by law, it is expected that a patent term is 20 years from the filing date -- however there is an exception to that rule if the patent is not issued within 2 years -- if the patent is not issued within 2 years (due to a USPTO delay) the clock on that 20 years is paused until the patent issues. There are still hundreds of thousands of patents filed on things like HDTV which havent yet issued. It means that HDTV technology will be patent encumbered for the long term future. Nobody has the incentive to fix it. If you wanted to make an open hardware HDTV, you can't do it royalty free because a lot of the HDTV standards essential technologies are still patented and will STAY patented virtually forever thanks to the USPTO patent backlog. Why would any tech companies object to that? They make money off the patents they filed that got issued PLUS the ones that were filed but the USPTO hasnt taken action on them. Think about it this way if Sony filed two patents on HD technology, they get one of them issued fairly quickly within 2 years .. and then by luck or bribery the USPTO action on the second patent is delayed 19 years just as the first patent is expiring .. then because it's the USPTO's fault that the second patent didnt issue .. they get to claim 17 years of additional monopoly on the HD technology. I am not against patents, I am against infinitely long patents .. which are unconstitutional .. yet in practice the USPTO is enabling it. Let's not forget that the constitution only authorizes patent rights if and only if they enable the advancement of the useful arts and sciences (and those too for limited times).
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Think about it this way if Sony filed two patents on HD technology, they get one of them issued fairly quickly within 2 years .. and then by luck or bribery the USPTO action on the second patent is delayed 19 years just as the first patent is expiring .. then because it's the USPTO's fault that the second patent didnt issue .. they get to claim 17 years of additional monopoly on the HD technology. I am not against patents, I am against infinitely long patents .. which are unconstitutional .. yet in practice the USPTO is enabling it.
Except for the fact that that never, ever happens.
Seriously, find me a patent that has 19 years of patent term adjustment. Here's an article [patentlyo.com] discussing how almost 100% of patents that get granted do so within 4 years, with the very longest outlier being 6 years.
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That survey only looked at patents issued on a single day. There are still a couple hundred thousand unexamined patents from the 80s and 90s .. what will the patent term adjustment look like when they issue?
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/... [bloomberg.com]
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That survey only looked at patents issued on a single day. There are still a couple hundred thousand unexamined patents from the 80s and 90s .. what will the patent term adjustment look like when they issue?
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/... [bloomberg.com]
Nothing, because those patents don't get patent term adjustment. And while, yes, there are still a few patent applications floating around from that era, that law was changed 20 years ago. It's already been taken care of for everything since then, and since you can't apply it retroactively, there's nothing more that can be done.
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Oh yeah? http://www.patentlyapple.com/p... [patentlyapple.com]
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Nothing, because those patents don't get patent term adjustment. And while, yes, there are still a few patent applications floating around from that era, that law was changed 20 years ago. It's already been taken care of for everything since then, and since you can't apply it retroactively, there's nothing more that can be done.
Oh yeah? http://www.patentlyapple.com/p... [patentlyapple.com]
Yeah. That patent has no patent term adjustment, as I said.
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i) Yes, unless it qualifies for a patent term adjustment.
ii) virtually every patent issued nowadays is delayed so much that patent term adjustments are virtually guaranteed. You always get it when the USPTO doesn't approve your patent within a specified time as a result of their delays.
iii) Yes.
iv) If the patent is delayed they can get back royalties from others who independently came up with similar technology during the time in which the patent was being processed -- at least recently new applications are
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i) Yes, unless it qualifies ........
Look moderately hard at:
Patent No. 6,266,674
Filed... Mar 16, 1992
Issued Jul. 24, 2001
Did they patent the original adventure game (created c. 1975-76)? ....http://rickadams.org/adventure/a_history.html
Dropping a gold coin or more is clearly a user
defined label for navigating a data structure.
Game after game would play a tune...
Recall the interface for Marble Madness Atari Games c.1984.
http://www.aes.org/aeshc/pdf/f... [aes.org]
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http://www.patentlyapple.com/p... [patentlyapple.com]
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Fuck the system (Score:1)
Logical ruling (Score:3)
and sounds based along the same lines of an individual can't ignore a law even if they think it will (at some point) be deemed unconstitutional. So Cisco should have moved to have the patent revoked prior to making use of it rather than infringe and then try after (if at all).
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and sounds based along the same lines of an individual can't ignore a law even if they think it will (at some point) be deemed unconstitutional. So Cisco should have moved to have the patent revoked prior to making use of it rather than infringe and then try after (if at all).
Yes you can, and you have to. If there are two laws that contradict each other you have to decide which one to follow. If one of the two laws happens to be the constitution, that is an easy choice. Beware though that a lot of people thinks the constitution says a lot more specific things than it really does.
Ignorance of law / ignorance of patent validity (Score:1)
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2014/12/15/3603686/supreme-court-if-youre-a-cop-mistakes-about-the-law-wont-stop-your-drug-bust/
The Supreme Court says police can be mistaken about the laws governing their conduct, and that's fine. But a company can't be mistaken about whether a patent's validity will be upheld in court.