Why Do We Let Juries Set Patent Award Damages? Appeals Court Throws Out Another Jury Award
from the dumped dept
There is a mythology in the US about the value and importance of patents -- and because of that, it's not surprising that patent trials involving juries quite often end with the patent holder being declared victor, and a huge amount being awarded by the jury. Microsoft and Alcatel-Lucent have been involved in a whole series of patent battles recently. Two years ago, a jury found for Alcatel-Lucent on a patent related to MP3 technology, and it awarded Alcatel-Lucent a stunning $1.5 billion. It didn't take long for a judge to toss out that award. More recently, in another patent dispute involving the same parties (but a totally different patent), a jury awarded Alcatel-Lucent $358 million because Microsoft included a "date-picker" calendar tool in Microsoft Outlook. Yet, once again, an appeals court has now tossed out the jury's award amount, noting how ridiculous it is that such a tiny, minor feature should get such a huge dollar value:The portion of the profit that can be credited to the infringing use of the date-picker tool is exceedingly small.... In short, Outlook is an enormously complex software program comprising hundreds, if not thousands or even more, features. We find it inconceivable to conclude, based on the present record, that the use of one small feature, the date-picker, constitutes a substantial portion of the value of Outlook.So why do we (as a matter of policy, not law) allow juries to make such decisions when they seem to have trouble picking reasonable amounts, given the nature of the patents and the lawsuits?
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Filed Under: awards, patents
Companies: alcatel-lucent, microsoft
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This is a very good decision for FOSS
Any patent damages whatsoever would be excessive, when compared to the profit from a free product, and therefore would would be overturned.
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Re:
(I think, I might be wrong)
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Amount to charge
X = Lines of Infringing Code / Lines of Code written
Amount awarded = Amount of money made * X
Therefore if you have a 100000 lines of code of which 50 infringe on a patent then you are only going to have to pay out $0.0005 for every $1 you make. That's $5000 for making $10,000,000.
Or Something similar.
But I don't really mind American Courts fining American companies for innovating, it means more opportunities for startups in other countries.
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Re: Amount to charge
I'm not sure how the idea of a date picker is not obvious, but I don't think there is a way to use an equation for every case. It would be nice to submit cases like this to a group of people that understand technology to decide the damages (or better yet if there was infringement).
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Re: Amount to charge
X = Lines of Infringing Code / Lines of Code written
Amount awarded = Amount of money made * X "
Then you would end up with things like this:
http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The-Utlimate-State-Selector.aspx
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Re: Re: Amount to charge
Once you dive into internals you get more and more disgusted
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Re: Re: Re: Amount to charge
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Re: Re: Amount to charge
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Re: Amount to charge
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Re: Amount to charge
Preemptive BloatWare Here We Come!
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Why not let them pick?
The award should be punitive, not just simply "X% of profits". If we continue to allow companies, especially huge companies with basically endless legal resources, to infringe with completely minor slaps on the wrists, what's to prevent them from continuing the pratice? $358 million seems like a lot, but for MS, it's really not. But it's enough to get their attention and perhaps think twice about infringing next time. The judge will probably reduce it to something like $10 million, and MS will appeal again and get it reduced even further. Probably 99% of the time, they get away with infringement simply because they pick on little guys and out-lawyer them. But these few times where they picked on someone with enough resources to take it to trial, the fine should hurt. Eventually, through appeals and legal jockeying, they'll pay little or nothing, and simply continue on praticing infringement.
I'm not for exessive stupidity on damage awards, but until damages actually get the attention of offending parties, this kind of practice will continue.
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Why?
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Yet another reason...
There is no way you should be able to patent ANY software of ANY kind. There are 1,000,000,000 ways to do ANYTHING with software. To patent the expression of a single result is a decision made by an idiot who knew absolutely nothing about writing code.
Pure idiocy!
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Guiding the Blind
In the end it seemed more like a 'put the finger in the air and test the wind' process once we got to deliberations amongst the jurors. Try as I might, I couildnt' get anyone to really try the math (very, very limited algrebra involved with basic arithmetic), everyone wanted to simply select from one of the 'ranges' the plaintiff's lawyer suggested.
I'm curious as to whether these juries discussed in the article were given similar guidelines and in the end decided on the laziest answer?
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well this is Microsoft...
It would be better to have a completely independent third party offering opinions on the value of the damages and finding the middle ground.
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clueless techdirt lemming-punks
I wouldn't trust you to clean my toilets
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Re: clueless techdirt lemming-punks
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This article to me tends to suggest this is a significant problem, when experience in such matters demonstrates that this is rarely the case.
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Problem is with "reasonable royalty"
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