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The Courts Businesses Patents Software The Almighty Buck Technology

Supreme Court Backs Award of Overseas Patent Damages (reuters.com) 54

Posted by BeauHD from the money-back-guarantee dept.
schwit1 quotes a report from Reuters: The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Friday that companies can recover profits lost because of the unauthorized use of their patented technology abroad in a victory for Schlumberger NV, the world's largest oilfield services provider. The decision expands the ability of patent owners to recover foreign-based damages, increasing the threat posed by certain infringement lawsuits in the United States.

Internet-based companies and others had expressed concern that extending patent damages beyond national borders would expose U.S. high-technology firms to greater patent-related risks abroad. U.S. patent law generally applies only domestically, but Schlumberger said that since the law protects against infringement that occurs when components of a patented invention are supplied from the U.S. for assembly abroad, it should be fully compensated for the infringement, including any lost foreign sales. The high court agreed.
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Supreme Court Backs Award of Overseas Patent Damages More

Supreme Court Backs Award of Overseas Patent Damages

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  • Globalization is great (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Friday June 22, 2018 @07:14PM (#56831694)
    if you're a player on the global stage. Not so sure about us regular chaps though. I mean, I'm unlikely to ever have the resources to run an international lawsuit to enforce patent law but I could see getting sued by a mega corp who does. It'd be a great way to keep any upstart competitors from popping up. Let's not forget how Hollywood was founded.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I used to think patents were a good thing. And, maybe once, they were. These days however they are nothing but an essential step on the road to lawsuit profits.

      • Re:Globalization is great (Score:4, Insightful)

        by alvinrod ( 889928 ) on Friday June 22, 2018 @08:13PM (#56831868)
        The problem with removing them entirely is that it's going to be quite hard for any inventor to function independently. Without any protection by law, someone's ability to sell an invention for profit lasts only until some big player can take it apart and build it for far less due to their existing manufacturing capability and the scale of their operations.

        This isn't entirely bad as it means that costs for existing goods and products will drop as there's nothing to stop anyone who thinks they can manufacture something for less from attempting to do so. However, these manufacturers don't have a lot of incentive to spend resources on new inventions since they only have a very short window to recoup that investment before a competitor starts producing it as well and they may figure that they can just wait for the competition to invent some new thing. Investment in reducing the cost of manufacturing is where money would be directed since it makes a company more competitive, and improvements in manufacturing techniques or tools can naturally be hidden from competitors.

        The same goes for other fields as well. Creating a medicine becomes essentially worthless since it can be easily replicated once the chemical composition is discovered, but a surgical technique or procedure may be less difficult to emulate as the knowledge of precisely how it works is not disseminated so easily merely by the acquisition of it. Goods of all kinds become less valuable compared to services. You're probably only likely to see new types of goods, medicines, etc. arise as a result of crowd funding of some form or perhaps someone extremely wealthy wishing to cure themselves of some affliction. There will probably always be some people who will invent for the hell of it, simply because it excites them, but these people are rare.

        I don't know if one of these worlds is better than another, but a lack of patents does suggest a certain tendency to hoard knowledge. Patents reward those individuals or companies that can create something new and novel (that in reality we fall short of this quite often is another matter) and there's less value in hoarding the knowledge since a lack of one means the competition can make your product should they figure out how. If it's really successful, they might even find different methods of achieving a similar outcome. Regardless, the patent eventually expires and anyone can produce the invention.

        I'd be somewhat remiss to throw out the entire idea because the implementation has become horribly broken. Especially considering that there are several practical (and rather simple) steps that could be taken to fix a great deal of the problem with the patent system. I wouldn't necessary shed a tear to see it go either, but that would introduce massive amounts of change into a system that's grown up around a certain set of laws. Maybe you could argue that the longterm benefits outweigh the short term chaos, but that's not a pool I'd like to jump into without sticking a few toes in first in order to test the water.

        • "The problem with removing them entirely is that it's going to be quite hard for any inventor to function independently."

          While your argument seems to make sense, let's check it against reality.

          Back in the early days of XX century, the ability to enforce patents was much less than it is today, both domestically and abroad, still, it was a period of franctic innovation in all kind of business.

          Back in the 50's, business process were not patent-encumbered, but USA companies grew orders of magnitude out of bette

          • I'm not sure I necessarily agree with you on your points. Hollywood is a good example of an early 20th century industry that sprung up around avoiding patents. You could point to Jobs and Apple taking from Xerox PARC (though they weren't the innovators of many of their ideas [wikipedia.org] either) as well. In both cases those groups or companies certainly enriched themselves, but at the expense of the people who did most of the original leg work and innovation.

            My argument isn't that this will result in a loss of wealth

            • "You no longer reward the person who is best able to develop a new idea, but the person who is best able to execute on an idea"

              You see that you are making my point, right?

              Patents are NOT, and NEVER were meant to reward ideas but the abililty to execute ideas.

              The trend to protect mere ideas (like granting too generic patents, or granting patents on pure ideal fields, like maths) is a recent one, and one against what patents are for, both technically (it is not about ideas) and in spirit (they are coercing in

    • Re:Globalization is great (Score:5, Informative)

      by currently_awake ( 1248758 ) on Friday June 22, 2018 @08:06PM (#56831842)
      The NSA runs a global phone/internet spying ring, and some people have suggested they occasionally hand over technology they intercept to American companies. If this is true, then American companies can steal tech, patent it, and sue the inventors to prevent them from using it.

    • Let's not forget how Hollywood was founded.

      How?

    • I mean, I'm unlikely to ever have the resources to run an international lawsuit to enforce patent law but I could see getting sued by a mega corp who does.

      Unless you're a company which runs a business internationally and has a presence in the USA while selectively infringing USA patents elsewhere I don't think this story or ruling has any implication for you.

      The way I see it this is just rich large corporations suing each other. Small corporations wouldn't be in a position to infringe in this way and would likely get sued locally under local law or simply have their products blocked from import.

  • Judgment all you want (Score:3)

    by DatbeDank ( 4580343 ) on Friday June 22, 2018 @07:24PM (#56831746)

    If you don't have the means to enforce it or collect abroad, it's effectively useless.

    • Why would a company in Houston go abroad to collect a judgement from another company in Houston? ION is six miles from Schlumberger.

    • Re:Judgment all you want (Score:4, Informative)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Saturday June 23, 2018 @04:23AM (#56832796)

      If you don't have the means to enforce it or collect abroad, it's effectively useless.

      This isn't about collecting abroad. It's about collecting locally from US companies doing business abroad. This is about you and me going about our business in the USA. It's about you having a patent. It's about me creating a product that violates that patent and in an attempt to skirt your law selling that product somewhere else in the world but not in the USA. ... Then you suing me for it.

  • Tariffs just became moot, just sue them over stolen tech.

  • If you do business with someone in Londinium, you're subject to the laws which the city of London, England, had agreed are common with other cities on the Hanseatic League. The league has expanded somewhat over time, and includes pretty much everyone who agrees with the Rule of Law. Outlaw states like North Korea, somewhat less so.
  • Does this mean people can sue a company for their overseas employment practices too?

    • If ION were violating the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the ADA, or some other discrimination laws in overseas offices, yes employees could sue for the overseas discrimination if they are US citizens working abroad.

      The Fair Labor Standards Act does NOT apply overseas.

      Much of employment law is at the state level. I don't know off hand which Texas employment laws apply to Texas companies like ION regarding employment outside of Texas.

  • Here is the opinion. (Score:5, Informative)

    by BitterOak ( 537666 ) on Saturday June 23, 2018 @01:19AM (#56832568)
    The article didn't provide a link to the SCOTUS opinion, so here it is [supremecourt.gov]. It is an interesting split. Thomas wrote for the majority and was joined by Roberts, Kennedy, Ginsburg, Alito, Sotomayor, and Kagen. Gorsuch wrote the dissent, joined by Breyer.

  • "Schlumberger said that since the law protects against infringement that occurs when components of a patented invention are supplied from the U.S. for assembly abroad, it should be fully compensated for the infringement, including any lost foreign sales. The high court agreed."

    Russia, China, India: "Take a long, hard suck on our boners. And thanks for all the tech.

    The US middle class, which provided most of the purchasing power that made the US such a great place to sell basic merchandise into, is being

  • Patents in the US are "first to invent" ultimately as discovered by examining the inventor's notebooks. Almost everywhere else, it's "first to file", i.e. when the patent office receives the application. Which means US patents can claim to precede valid earlier patents elsewhere. That was "sort of" OK when the two patent systems didn't overlap - a US company gets an EU patent when its application is received by Albert Einstein or similar. But extending US patent jurisdiction outside the US can lead to a

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      AFAIK the US switched to some form of first-to-file a few years back.

      • The US switched to 'first inventor to file".

        So for example if you approached a company about making or marketing your invention, before you patented it, and they wrote you an email saying "wow, that's a neat idea. We would have never thought of that", then they tried to patent it, their patent would not take precedence, because they admitted they didn't invent it.

        The US now also has provisional patents, which allows small inventors to file inexpensively right away, then they have a year to figure out if it

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