I don't understand. If "all four of VirnetX’s patents have been found invalid by the patent office" as Apple claims, why hasn't the case been dismissed?
(i think it's a BS ruling, but it is a final appeals court ruling on the validity of the patents).
As for the PTO finding them invalid:
If you look at the file wrappers of these patents, you will see what apple means is "someone has requested review of these patents by the PTO, and they have initially been found invalid".
(Apple's request to review validity was in fact, denied)
> So as usual, Apple is lying/misleading people here. At least 'technically'.
No. Apple are arguing that the patents are invalid. They aren't sayin they have been found invalid already. The TechCrunch article said "All four of VirnetX’s patents have been found invalid by the patent office"
I don't get this. Is there some paid off official there? Different standards? Why is it such a great place to win patent troll suits - which seem to get overturned in higher courts? Is the idea that a win there will stop the defendant from trying to appeal?
It's the judges and the court - somehow a mindset has developed there which is at odds with most other patent cases in the US. This is a part of the country which has very little, so big corporations fighting patent cases bring a lot of money into the area and prestige to a court which otherwise would be in a backwater. It's a federal court, so the same laws apply as anywhere else, but there's enough wiggle room in the way those laws are written to allow this kind of "bad faith" interpretation. The solution is for congress to tighten up the laws, but that won't happen anytime soon.
The idea isn't just that a win there will discourage an appeal, but that the court will hear cases that most other courts would dismiss out of hand based on obvious prior art, vague claims, or USPTO investigation results. So the defendant is tied up in a court case, which includes an expensive jury trial. Worse still, the jury is so biased that they're all but guaranteed to loose the case. Most savvy defendents would choose to settle in that situation - which is all the patent-holder actually wants.
> somehow a mindset has developed there which is at odds with most other patent cases in the US.
Different courts form slightly different interpretations. There's a reason that the 2nd Circuit is the most liberal court. This court happens to be the most pro-plaintiff patent court you can find. It's not surprising the plaintiffs file there.
> This is a part of the country which has very little
Have you ever been there?
> so big corporations fighting patent cases bring a lot of money into the area and prestige to a court which otherwise would be in a backwater.
Do you think Apple fighting a court case floods money down the street like a river?
> the jury is so biased
Make whatever claims you want about the court, but if as you claim this area is a backwater with nothing going for it, how exactly is the local populace educated enough about the finer points of patent litigation to be biased?
This is a stupid decision but the mental gymnastics you're going through to try to make it fault of the area is impressive.
>Do you think Apple fighting a court case floods money down the street like a river?
Yes. Lawyers have to eat, and they get paid enough to eat well. They need a place to stay, and they get paid enough to stay at a nice hotel. They need coffee, they need an airport, they need a rental car that needs gas. Your argument is that having people come to your city doesn't add to the local economy, but the fact that whole cities are built on tourism proves otherwise.
It's more than that. I used to work at company that turned patent troll. They actually paid "folks on the ground" who essentially lived there (part of that may have been pure corruption with campaign funds sent to judges re-election campaigns).
And that was a small company. Multiply that by 1000x and then add the defense payoffs from big corps...
The thing is that East Texas no longer has a monopoly on this - more jurisdictions are opening up to handling patent litigation (not sure what's driving that).
Although I think this kind of story is plausible in general, it may be worth pointing out that Federal judges, who hear patent cases, are always appointed (at a national level) and never elected, unlike local judges. So they don't have election campaigns to contribute to.
Samsung built an ICE RINK right next to the courthouse. They did that because they thought pouring money into town would help sway the jury pool in their favor.
> But why do patent plaintiffs, especially trolls, see it as such a favorable forum? Partly, the district's relatively rapid litigation timetable can put pressure on defendants to settle. But other local practices in the Eastern District also favor patentees. And, in our view, they do so in a way that is inconsistent with the governing Federal Rules, and work to mask the consistent refusal by the courts in the Eastern District to end meritless cases before trial.
No Federal judge has ever been fired due to a reduction in the number of positions on the judge's court. (It's quite possible that a decreased caseload could result in fewer new judicial confirmations, but that affects would-be judges, not presently-serving judges.)
I don't think it's a coincidence there is that there is a ice skating rink right in front of the courthouse in Marshall, Texas with giant Samsung logos all over it (relevant John Oliver clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bxcc3SM_KA#t=7m53s) .
The Presidential aka executive branch does not have that kind of direct authority in the United States. At best, the executive can start a criminal investigation, which case must be made before the court branch; the laws that were broken were set by the legislative branch.
Courts in the US are given an extremely high degree of independence, in the goal of limiting corruption.
> Courts in the US are given an extremely high degree of independence, in the goal of limiting corruption.
And exactly the opposite ended up happening in this case, isn't it? Corruption is a world-wide problem, but I don't know how widespread it is in developed countries. And its the same problem, people sitting at the top don't have authority to curb the ground-level corruption. Here in India at least, the government has started implementing something called Lokpal:
It is an agency which works at the ground-level to curb the corruption both in the private and public sectors (and also the ministry). A question arose, however, that what happens if the Lokpal people itself went corrupt? And that's why the concept of decentralization was introduced. The central Indian agency, CBI can check the corruption in Lokpal, and of course, the courts have authority over both CBI and Lokpal. Thus, decentralization is at least, the present way of stopping corruption here.
Right, I remember the controversy over Lokpal, I was following India news more then. Developed countries tend to have less overt corruption and more implicit corruption; the populace simply doesn't stand for open bribes. Chicago is probably the most overt location in the US for corruption; elsewhere it tends to look very much like "rotating door" policies, as well as police looking the other way for important people.
The Supreme Court's job is to issue smackdowns on appeals courts, and they have been doing so rather consistently. EFF is lobbying the lower federal courts at the moment. See this story for details: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/eff-asks-appeals-...
But yeah, the President is actually quite weak. The President can't do shit about this problem.
Well, only Congress can impeach federal judges. So POTUS can't do anything in that regard, but POTUS administers the Patent Office. Obama could write one little letter telling them to mark all new patents and all old patents up for review as invalid. I believe this can be done without the approval of congress. I imagine there would be a lawsuit immediately from various parties. My best guess is that SCOTUS would be forced to uphold this executive order.
In fact, Obama has done this, but not to such an extreme degree.
Obama issued five executive orders on patent reform last summer. Among other things, they require the Patent and Trademark Office to stop issuing overly broad patents, and to force patent applicants to provide more details on what invention they are claiming. One of the orders opens up patent applications for public scrutiny — crowdsourcing — while they are in the approval stage, to help examiners locate prior art and assist with analyzing patent claims.
patents.stackexchange.com is the answer to this. As you mentioned crowdsourcing as a means to scrutinize the patents, this website is exactly doing that. I hope someone on the jury panel at least refers to this website before awarding the patent trolls their victories.
Congress definitely has the power, but so does the federal court system. I think its more beneficial to push the federal courts to attack the East Texas problem.
NPR: This American Life did an excellent episode about patent trolls where they cover east Texas and what it is about it that makes it so lucrative to file the suit there. Here is the episode transcript: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/441/t...
The audio of the show can be listened to there as well. Apologies on not giving a summary. I normally would, but it has been a while since I listened to it and I don't want to misrepresent it.
Indeed, it's been a huge bonanza for the local residents as big corporations have rolled into town and spent millions on PR (often as close to the courthouse as they can get). Everyone in town is courted (forgive the pun) to try and see corporations in the best possible light, just in case they turn up on a jury in a case against $BIGCORP at a later date.
Great place for camping (45 minutes north-west near Gilmer, TX has an awesome OHV aka off-roading park). It's also got fairly mild weather (though doesn't freeze as often as I would've expected): http://www.usclimatedata.com/climate/gilmer/texas/united-sta...
Anyways, no pro-Marshall or anything. The idea of East Texas being a poor-ish "backwater" isn't far off the mark. But if you like nature and goofin' off, it's a real nice place to do it.
