So? Federal judges and juries in the eastern district of Texas are from the eastern district of Texas. They don't commute from magic federal land every day. They attended the same schools everyone else did.
5 judges on the Eastern District are not from the Eastern district. They are presidentially appointed, and did not attend the schools that everyone else did in many if not most cases.
Holy crap: correct me if I'm wrong, but 6000 nationwide patent cases in one year, and one judge had 900 cases in his court, meaning that one judge was responsible for 15 percent of this entire country's patent cases.
I hope I screwed that up somehow because that is insane.
On the plus side, they might end up saving us time on reading. I think everyone on this site could tell where the article was going after the first five words.
There's two main current factors (and one older factor) that seem to be cited for ED Texas place in patent litigation:
1. It used to be "rocket docket" where patent cases came to trial quickly, which is generally seen as favoring plaintiffs (since they have likely done more prep before the case is filed); this is no apparently no longer the case, however.
2. It apparently has a jury pool more inclined to large damage awards, and possibly somewhat more plaintiff friendly in terms of finding liability at all (often attributed to age and local culture regarding property rights.)
3. It has judges that are reputed to be less inclined to summary judgement motions from the defense and more inclined to let patent cases go to juries on evidence where other courts would award summary judgement for the defense.
If the jurors in that area of the country have a special incentive to keep these trials going, then that should be grounds to move them elsewhere. Local businesses may be benefitting by having the increase in outside revenue due to the influx of legal teams and such.
This will be appealed until the end of time - all this did was cost CBS more in legal fees. In the intervening years, Personal Audio will use this one win as a stick with which to extort settlements, but that will only be effective against people that can't afford to litigate it.
These ultimate winner in appellate court after an extremely questionable verdict is usually the last man standing. Since CBS has vastly more resources than Personal Audio, my guess is that CBS will ultimately emerge the "winner," if you can call spending millions in legal fees "winning".
The scariest part about these cases is with Trans-Pacific Partnership[1] they set a precedent for not only the United States, but a whole slew of other countries[2].
A lot of complaints about East Texas in here. I've had a few myself since I grew up there. That being said, this isn't the only example of gaming the patent/courts system. Blaming the jurors for being prototypical dumb hicks that some of them are is fun but misses the point. The real problem is that a tech patent case wound up there to begin with. There is definitely no interesting podcasting or other telecomm technology being invented there (Longview); and that isn't the fault of the jurors. These companies set up sham offices in the area to pretend that they belong in the Ninth Circuit court. Fix the courts and you'll improve the situation a bit. Of course, the company was predicated on a sham to begin with, so I'm not sure how you fix that.
East Texas is very different from the rest of Texas. The accent, food, culture are all much more stereotypically southern than north, west, central, or south Texas. Even the BBQ is different - you put sauce on everything.
That being said, my comment offers no real information. I just thought that it would be fun to post.
This American Life actually did a pretty good story on patents. I'm pretty sure part of it explained the historical reason for why the ninth circuit gets so many patent cases: patent cases are lower priority on dockets, so if plaintiffs ever wanted their cases heard they needed to find a court that had less higher priority cases to hear.
I don't think most people see it as the jurors being "dumb hicks" but rather the jurors (a fair number of whom are likely local business owners) having a vested interest in having legal teams from all over the country continue to bring cases to this district to prop up local businesses (which is far more likely to happen if they find for infringement because it the plaintiffs who move the cases there).
Wouldn't matter if this sort of thing were happening in NYC or SF (though, practically speaking it would be less likely since the business brought in through the lawsuit treadmill would be far less of the overall local economic pie), it would still be a huge problem. When local jurors find in favor of the plaintiff so often and with a significant amount of those cases being so egregious that circuit courts are later forced to find that "that no reasonable jury could have held the patent valid", then it seems likely there are some fundamental perverse incentives that have to be addressed.
These suits seem to create a pretty clear "us vs. the outsiders" situation, with various side effects such as being able to charge vastly higher rents to the plaintiffs in a small town. Plenty of upside to the townspeople with no downside. As conspiracies go, the formation of this one is fairly predictable.
You could call it that, but to be clear I don't think these people got together and planned this out in advance, I think a confluence of events occurred that resulted in a situation which was beneficial to them and now they act (perhaps even in a mostly non-coordinated way) to maintain and strengthen it... rather predictably.
So we don't do jury trials in criminal cases where the jury can get the crime (96% pleas), but when it is about complex and bullshit IP laws, where even very savvy person will be confused - fire away.
Most criminal cases plea out because sentences have increased dramatically over the last few decades. You can plea down to a small sentence or take your chances with 15-20 years in prison, if you're convicted. Prosecutors know this and pump up a case with as many charges as possible so you won't be tempted to take it to trial.
You can argue that juries aren't savvy enough to judge a complicated IP case and I'd agree with you but that's what the appeals court is there for. If the jury got it wrong, you can appeal to judges who, presumably, have a better understanding.
> You can argue that juries aren't savvy enough to judge a complicated IP case and I'd agree with you but that's what the appeals court is there for. If the jury got it wrong, you can appeal to judges who, presumably, have a better understanding.
The appellate court for patent cases is the Federal Circuit, which is full of former patent lawyers who don't really understand software and like validating ridiculous software patents. After that you can only appeal to the Supreme Court, and only if they take the case and you haven't been bankrupted yet.
I used to work for a court. Believe it or not, prosecutors have better things to do than try and make marginal cases. The vast majority of time when they bring the case, the evidence is overwhelming. Now, you may or may not agree with the law (maybe having a kilo of crack in your car trunk shouldn't be a crime), but that's a separate issue from whether a jury trial would be more effective in truth finding.
Let's not kid ourselves - most people [arrested by the police, charged with a crime, sent to prison] are guilty. This is what makes preserving justice for the exceptions such a hard problem.
Especially as the judiciary primarily upholds procedural rights by disregarding ill-gotten evidence.
(And to preempt the inevitable complaint about trials being too expensive - if that much of the population is committing crimes, then perhaps it's time for some to be decriminalized or at least prioritized. A jurisdiction desiring to prosecute so much should be forced to raise taxes to cover its true expense - and that includes funding a defense attorney for everyone.)
Wait, are you sure that everyone should have a trial? The majority of criminal cases are open-and-shut straightforward (remember, we only hear about the interesting cases). What's the purpose of requiring a trial when the outcome is foreordained?
Obviously, it's impossible to know exactly who does and doesn't need a trial, which is why everyone is entitled to one. But incentives to keep pointless trials from bogging down the system make sense, too.
The majority of crimes are also not Silverglate "transporting the wrong species of kiwi across state lines". A plurality of incarcerated people in IL and IN are in for domestic violence; the majority are in for violent crimes.
Doesn't the setup of that incentive strike you as perverse? Years of someone's life versus government operating expenses? If the goal were efficient government, there are much more straightforward ways to achieve that.
If the defendant is guilty and deserves the punishment they stand to receive at trial, then the prosecutor is doing society a disservice by letting them off easy for expedience. On the other hand, if the plea sentence is adequate punishment/rehabilitation/etc, then why are they being threatened with a much larger sentence?
It seems to me that the feedback loop on sentences operates on the time specific criminals spend in jail being deemed too short during campaign season. As such, the plea sentence (ie "worst case") reflects what society deems appropriate (modulo the problems with democracy). Everything above the offered plea really is just an added threat to encourage a defendant to forgo the trial and submit to the judgment of the prosecutor.
If the case is really so open-and-shut, then it should not take terribly long for a proper court to see so as well.
Every dollar we spend on a ritualized but ultimately pointless trial for a defendant who already knows they're going to be convicted is a dollar we aren't spending on schools. So no, the logic here isn't obvious to me.
There are defendants who know that they will be convicted, yet won't be enticed by a plea bargain because their crime is so heinous (or they are already incarcerated for life). These defendants will stand for a full jury trial, hoping for the chance of an acquittal. Every dollar spent on these trials is a dollar that isn't spent on schools. Therefore, we should eliminate the inefficiencies of jury trials and "beyond a reasonable doubt" so that more money can go to schools.
tptacek isn't saying that we should reduce costs under any circumstances. He's saying that we should reduce costs where it is reasonable to do so. There are a huge number of cases every year where everyone knows the defendant is guilty and the defendant isn't interested in defending himself. Why, as tptacek put it, have a "ritualized but ultimately pointless trial" in these situations?
I argued why it was reasonable to do so. tptacek rebutted my argument with a sweeping emotional statement that money is better spent on schools than on justice. As such, one counter example suffices.
Years of someone's life versus government operating expenses?
Have you spent much time on jury duty? Hanging out in a room full of prospective jurors, some of whom are literally praying for the day's cases to get settled before they're compelled to spend days or even weeks in court, gives one a real gut-level appreciation for the court system's love of settlements.
It's not just a matter of paying more taxes, because the costs of a jury trial can't all be settled with cash. Jurors get paid a stipend in my state, but it's $50 per day, which wouldn't fully compensate a minimum-wage worker, let alone a doctor, a lawyer, or a consultant. Companies must pay their salaried workers for up to three days of jury service, but lots of people don't have salaries (see above under "consultants"), and backlogs and inboxes accumulate whether you're on the job or not.
And, even if it were a good idea, dialing back the right to trial-by-jury in the USA would be the opposite of a "straightforward" reform, because that right is in the Constitution.
You're either in MA, or that "compensation" schedule is popular. I agree with your description of jury duty, and it has major problems as well. But I disagree with this statement:
> because the costs of a jury trial can't all be settled with cash.
Increase the stipend to be in line with a person's salary, or their education level if they're self-employed. Yes, this is going to be expensive. But just like government efficiency is not a justification to destroy rights, it's also not a justification to demand people's uncompensated labor. And once jurors were properly compensated, I bet it would be much easier to cancel if one really had a problem with losing the time.
(Also, if the issue is only with the cost of jury trials, then I can weaken my argument to say that plea-bargains should turn into judge-bargains, where forgoing the jury will limit your punishment to the smaller amount)
> the right to trial-by-jury ... is in the Constitution
Yes, and my whole point is that plea bargaining has also undermined that right, only by a slow erosion over time rather than by an overt policy choice. To the extent that people would presently balk at eliminating juries for efficiency, they should also take issue with defendants effectively being denied a trial under threat of overblown punishment.
"Increase the stipend to be in line with a person's salary, or their education level if they're self-employed."
Maybe you could base it on their taxes. That should work regardless of their source of income, though of course we're assuming that income is the only thing being displaced worthy of compensation.
Is that because there is actual infringement of a valid patent or the patent holder is offering a settlement that's lower than the court costs to attack the patent?
There are a lot of possible reasons. There are a huge number of ways one party can "win" before a trial. And even if both parties make it past all those hurdles, no one will want to go to trial unless they are absolutely sure they will win: the cost of an adverse jury finding is too gigantic.
All of this is to say, it is not the case that the legal system is gung-ho about giving juries complex IP issues while simultaneously avoiding juries for "easier to understand" criminal matters.
> The company made the argument that the "podcasting" patent actually covered "episodic content" transmitted over the Internet, including video content. The patent refers to a "compilation file," which Personal Audio lawyers say correlates to the HTML webpage that CBS hosts its content at.
More than likely. Can't wait to hear why Carolla settled - wasn't his rallying based on defeating the patent troll rather than just getting the troll to go away?
Using money donated by listeners to _defeat_ the troll.. :(
From this CBS case, you can see that even a large company with bottomless legal pockets can lose a ridiculous patent case. Who's to say that Carolla would have won?
I think 1.3 million ends up being an interesting number. The number is small enough that CBS might consider just paying it.
However, they are a huge company with alot of lawyers at their disposal. They could chose to fight this without the financial burden that alot of smaller players like Adam Corolla would have had.
> Now that its patent has been validated against CBS, Personal Audio will be allowed to move forward with trials against NBC and Fox.
This is also interesting. The enemy of my enemy is my friend may come into play here as I'm sure FOX and NBC don't want to go to court.
I can see them helping CBS in an appeal with what I think is called an amicus breif/curiae on CBS behalf.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 92.0 ms ] threadYou are correct about the juries.
Which is kind of my initial point.
I hope I screwed that up somehow because that is insane.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/the-year-in-paten...
Is it the bed and breakfast industry? Do they profit from contingents having to stay local?
1. It used to be "rocket docket" where patent cases came to trial quickly, which is generally seen as favoring plaintiffs (since they have likely done more prep before the case is filed); this is no apparently no longer the case, however.
2. It apparently has a jury pool more inclined to large damage awards, and possibly somewhat more plaintiff friendly in terms of finding liability at all (often attributed to age and local culture regarding property rights.)
3. It has judges that are reputed to be less inclined to summary judgement motions from the defense and more inclined to let patent cases go to juries on evidence where other courts would award summary judgement for the defense.
These ultimate winner in appellate court after an extremely questionable verdict is usually the last man standing. Since CBS has vastly more resources than Personal Audio, my guess is that CBS will ultimately emerge the "winner," if you can call spending millions in legal fees "winning".
1 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Pacific_Partnership#Intel...
2 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Pacific_Partnership#Membe...
East Texas is very different from the rest of Texas. The accent, food, culture are all much more stereotypically southern than north, west, central, or south Texas. Even the BBQ is different - you put sauce on everything.
That being said, my comment offers no real information. I just thought that it would be fun to post.
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/441/w...
See http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/df/US_....
Wouldn't matter if this sort of thing were happening in NYC or SF (though, practically speaking it would be less likely since the business brought in through the lawsuit treadmill would be far less of the overall local economic pie), it would still be a huge problem. When local jurors find in favor of the plaintiff so often and with a significant amount of those cases being so egregious that circuit courts are later forced to find that "that no reasonable jury could have held the patent valid", then it seems likely there are some fundamental perverse incentives that have to be addressed.
[1] see the EFF link that paulgb provided in another post: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/09/after-setback-texas-fi...
I think it far more likely juries are trying their best to apply bad laws to badly issue patents.
You could call it that, but to be clear I don't think these people got together and planned this out in advance, I think a confluence of events occurred that resulted in a situation which was beneficial to them and now they act (perhaps even in a mostly non-coordinated way) to maintain and strengthen it... rather predictably.
Something is very wrong with that system.
You can argue that juries aren't savvy enough to judge a complicated IP case and I'd agree with you but that's what the appeals court is there for. If the jury got it wrong, you can appeal to judges who, presumably, have a better understanding.
The appellate court for patent cases is the Federal Circuit, which is full of former patent lawyers who don't really understand software and like validating ridiculous software patents. After that you can only appeal to the Supreme Court, and only if they take the case and you haven't been bankrupted yet.
Especially as the judiciary primarily upholds procedural rights by disregarding ill-gotten evidence.
(And to preempt the inevitable complaint about trials being too expensive - if that much of the population is committing crimes, then perhaps it's time for some to be decriminalized or at least prioritized. A jurisdiction desiring to prosecute so much should be forced to raise taxes to cover its true expense - and that includes funding a defense attorney for everyone.)
Obviously, it's impossible to know exactly who does and doesn't need a trial, which is why everyone is entitled to one. But incentives to keep pointless trials from bogging down the system make sense, too.
The majority of crimes are also not Silverglate "transporting the wrong species of kiwi across state lines". A plurality of incarcerated people in IL and IN are in for domestic violence; the majority are in for violent crimes.
If the defendant is guilty and deserves the punishment they stand to receive at trial, then the prosecutor is doing society a disservice by letting them off easy for expedience. On the other hand, if the plea sentence is adequate punishment/rehabilitation/etc, then why are they being threatened with a much larger sentence?
It seems to me that the feedback loop on sentences operates on the time specific criminals spend in jail being deemed too short during campaign season. As such, the plea sentence (ie "worst case") reflects what society deems appropriate (modulo the problems with democracy). Everything above the offered plea really is just an added threat to encourage a defendant to forgo the trial and submit to the judgment of the prosecutor.
If the case is really so open-and-shut, then it should not take terribly long for a proper court to see so as well.
tptacek isn't saying that we should reduce costs under any circumstances. He's saying that we should reduce costs where it is reasonable to do so. There are a huge number of cases every year where everyone knows the defendant is guilty and the defendant isn't interested in defending himself. Why, as tptacek put it, have a "ritualized but ultimately pointless trial" in these situations?
Have you spent much time on jury duty? Hanging out in a room full of prospective jurors, some of whom are literally praying for the day's cases to get settled before they're compelled to spend days or even weeks in court, gives one a real gut-level appreciation for the court system's love of settlements.
It's not just a matter of paying more taxes, because the costs of a jury trial can't all be settled with cash. Jurors get paid a stipend in my state, but it's $50 per day, which wouldn't fully compensate a minimum-wage worker, let alone a doctor, a lawyer, or a consultant. Companies must pay their salaried workers for up to three days of jury service, but lots of people don't have salaries (see above under "consultants"), and backlogs and inboxes accumulate whether you're on the job or not.
And, even if it were a good idea, dialing back the right to trial-by-jury in the USA would be the opposite of a "straightforward" reform, because that right is in the Constitution.
> because the costs of a jury trial can't all be settled with cash.
Increase the stipend to be in line with a person's salary, or their education level if they're self-employed. Yes, this is going to be expensive. But just like government efficiency is not a justification to destroy rights, it's also not a justification to demand people's uncompensated labor. And once jurors were properly compensated, I bet it would be much easier to cancel if one really had a problem with losing the time.
(Also, if the issue is only with the cost of jury trials, then I can weaken my argument to say that plea-bargains should turn into judge-bargains, where forgoing the jury will limit your punishment to the smaller amount)
> the right to trial-by-jury ... is in the Constitution
Yes, and my whole point is that plea bargaining has also undermined that right, only by a slow erosion over time rather than by an overt policy choice. To the extent that people would presently balk at eliminating juries for efficiency, they should also take issue with defendants effectively being denied a trial under threat of overblown punishment.
Maybe you could base it on their taxes. That should work regardless of their source of income, though of course we're assuming that income is the only thing being displaced worthy of compensation.
All of this is to say, it is not the case that the legal system is gung-ho about giving juries complex IP issues while simultaneously avoiding juries for "easier to understand" criminal matters.
> The company made the argument that the "podcasting" patent actually covered "episodic content" transmitted over the Internet, including video content. The patent refers to a "compilation file," which Personal Audio lawyers say correlates to the HTML webpage that CBS hosts its content at.
Using money donated by listeners to _defeat_ the troll.. :(
However, they are a huge company with alot of lawyers at their disposal. They could chose to fight this without the financial burden that alot of smaller players like Adam Corolla would have had.
> Now that its patent has been validated against CBS, Personal Audio will be allowed to move forward with trials against NBC and Fox.
This is also interesting. The enemy of my enemy is my friend may come into play here as I'm sure FOX and NBC don't want to go to court.
I can see them helping CBS in an appeal with what I think is called an amicus breif/curiae on CBS behalf.