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Juries and patience | 81 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Juries and patience
Authored by: argee on Friday, January 04 2013 @ 01:19 AM EST
To use your math, and the preceeding post's math, I
would tend to agree. Here is how to do it:

Apple alleges infringement of patents. Has 500 patents
that are valuable and claimed infringement. The profit
on the device is $200 per device, therefore each patent
is worth 40 cents per device. Samsung would then have
to pay 40 cents (x3 if willful) per infringed patent.

Now lets go to trial. In 2012, the court said they can
handle only ... 6 patents. Figure 3 infringed, now Samsung would owe 1.20 per
device sold. Now, in 2013, bring
another 6 up for review, etc. etc. Rinse and repeat. At
6 patents per year, perhaps 12 if the court is efficient,
it would take 40 years to resolve the issue.

I think you are being a bit unrealistic here. The court
told Apple to pick the BEST SIX and they went with it. It
is understood that the entire portfolio is being is
being compensated on the basis of those 6. This was
according to the jury, 1 billion dollars. Not for the
six, but for the entire portfolio. I thought that was
understood, and I do not think that Apple can now
go to trial in 2013 with the other 494.

Actually, I think the court erred here.

If Apple claimed 500 patents infringed, I think Apple
should have picked 3 to fight over, and Samsung the
other 3 patents. Obviously Apple would pick the three
they have a chance to win on, and Samsung the 3 most
likely to be laughed out of court.

The way it was done, it all favors Apple. I am sure
that in there somewhere, 6 of those patents are actually
meritorious. They do not have to be software patents;
they got to pick ANY six, hardware, design, software,
looney bin, whatever as representative of the entire
portfolio. I do not think that is the right way to go
about it.

But there it is.

---
--
argee

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Time wasted
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, January 04 2013 @ 03:01 AM EST

The USPTO spent several man-hours evaluating and issuing the valuable patents. Why should that TIME go waste?...
I think you've just answered your own question with your very next sentence:
The defendant has spent TIME, 2 years in this case, to get 2 of the 6 patents-in-suit re-examined, and preliminarily declared invalid on all counts by the USPTO. Why should that TIME go waste?
The time spent by the USPTO to originally valuate and issue the patents in the first place has been wasted as in a re-exam the patents have been [preliminarily] declared invalid; and this time has been wasted as in if the USPTO had done its evaluation properly in the first place, it would not have had to spend even more time re-evaluating the patents; along with the time the defendant wasted in doing the USPTO's job for it (in finding the prior art or whatever was needed to cause the validity of the patents to be put in question which the USPTO should have done in the first place), along with the other time wasted in having to set up a defence which would not otherwise have been necessary if the patents had not been issued [incorrectly] in the first place.

It all seems to boil down to the USPTO NOT doing its job properly and IT wasting its own and everyone else's time (in this case the defendant's [AND possibly the plaintiff's as they would not have brought the case if the patents had not been issued in the first place]).

It could be argued that the original patent applicant has actually wasted all this time as they should have known that the "invention" that they were trying to patent was not patentable and so not wasted the time of the USPTO in it finding it invalid (along with the time of this litigation).

Which has just raised a suspicion in my mind: The USPTO assumes that patent applications are valid and that a patent applicant is honest and truthful and that the "invention" they are trying to patent fits all the criteria for patenting and so rubber stamps the application with minimal checking and leave it up to the courts to actually do all the work they should have done - the delay in issuing patents is because they used to actually examine patents fully but got such a backlog; it is the minimal checking that reduces this backlog, but re-exams cause it to increase. Any modifications to a patent just removes that patent from its place in the queue and puts it back at the end (unfortunately without resetting the prior art date - that ought to be set to the date the patent last "reached the back of the queue").

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Everyone's time has been wasted.
Authored by: Wol on Friday, January 04 2013 @ 02:30 PM EST
More to the point, whichever party is shown to be "innocent", their
MONEY has been wasted.

Which allows a malicious plaintiff to bankrupt a weaker opponent. Or a wealthy
reckless plaintiff to cause havoc.

If a patent is (partially) invalidated, the patentee should bear all the costs,
re-exam, court, etc etc. At least that way, they are now deterred from suing on
weak grounds.

Cheers,
Wol

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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