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Appeals court hits largest public patent troll with $1.4M fee
- kelukelugames 11y agoI was hoping for Intellectual Ventures.
- thoman23 11y agoHa ha, exactly. Just like there are a few baseball umpires who are so bad you learn their names (Angel Hernandez, Phil Cuzzi, Joe West), Intellectual Ventures is one of the "companies" that most developers know of for all the wrong reasons. I remember when they sued every maker of "todo list" software.
- throwawaykf05 11y ago> I remember when they sued every maker of "todo list" software. Hmm, I must have missed that one. Link?
- thoman23 11y agoTurns out I was mistaking Angel Hernandez for Phil Cuzzi...so to speak. It was Channel Intelligence not IV that I was thinking of. http://techcrunch.com/2008/07/17/channel-intelligence-sues-just-about-everyone-who-offers-wishlists/# http://techcrunch.com/2008/07/17/channel-intelligence-sues-j... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=248577 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=248577
- throwawaykf05 11y agoAh I see, thanks. I've been following IV for a while and this didn't seem familiar, so was wondering.
- alexqgb 11y agoIt may not have been IV, but I doubt they missed this story. Or this one http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/east-texas-judge-throws-out-168-patent-cases-in-one-fell-swoop/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/east-texas-judge-...
- byoogle 11y agoRandomly, I met one of the founders of Intellectual Ventures today. I wasn’t sure if I was resolving the name right and, unfortunately in retrospect, I didn’t ask, ”Oh, the massive patent troll?”
- kelukelugames 11y agoAre you in Bellevue? One of them lived in my building.
- byoogle 11y agoNo, in Palo Alto. I guess this founder is based here.
- hga 11y agoDepends on how sloppy and bullheaded they are. In this case, the defendant had already paid to license these patents, and the troll evidently dragged its feed in dealing with its mistake. A bit akin to The SCO Group v. The Universe, in which they didn't have the rights to UNIX(TM). No way is a good judge going to let this off with a "mistakes were made" attitude.
- ww520 11y ago$1,025 per hour for partners, $750 for associates, and $310 for paralegals. Those are kind of high. Did they actually charge those rates? Or retroactively bumped up the rates once they knew the case was dismissed?
- Sanddancer 11y agoThose are fairly standard fees for a big law firm defending these kinds of cases. It's why most companies settle rather than fight cases.
- middleclick 11y agoOut of curiosity, is this the fee for just one lawyer or there are more than one?
- Sanddancer 11y agoA case like this, you'll have several doing research, poring through contracts, writing motions, etc. It's part of the reason why the judge gave such a big award. The other being that judge's really don't like being jerked around, and withholding evidence like this is just wasting everyone's time. Had Acacia provided the documents when they were requested, the case would have been settled years ago.
- eru 11y agoEach partner hour costs you 1 kUSD. If you have two partners working one hour each, or one partner working two hours doesn't matter.
- rhino369 11y agoEach attorney billes their rate. So ona conference call with 5 attorneys you might get billed 3k an hour. M Junior and mid level associates (400-650 an hour) do most of the heavy lifting. Partners are more supervisory, but will be do a lot for depositions, hearings, negotiations and trials. Even a relatively small case against Acacia costs like 1.5-2 mil.
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- curiousjorge 11y ago>$1,025-an-hour partners. TIL some people make literally a 100 times what the average person makes.
- eru 11y agoThat's what they charge for partners. Normal people easily get charged out for 50 USD per hour. Try calling a plumber to see for yourself. That doesn't mean that they actually get that much money for every hour worked, since the billed hours have to pay unbillable costs like office rent, admin overhead, taxes etc. If you are willing to look beyond the rich world: world average GDP per capita is something like 10k USD. At 2000 hours worked per year, that 0.5 USD per hour. Your `average' person already makes 20 times as much as the actual average person. (Keep in mind, that the median is lower than the average. Check out http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17512040 http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17512040)
- beedogs 11y ago> If you are willing to look beyond the rich world: world average GDP per capita is something like 10k USD. At 2000 hours worked per year, that 0.5 USD per hour. No it isn't. It's $5 an hour, barely under the US minimum wage.
- eru 11y agoThanks for catching that! Sorry, I obviously can't do arithmetic. Interesting that the global gdp is that high, actually. Comparing to the minimum wage is still a bit misleading, since the wage share of GDP is far from 100%.
- rhino369 11y agoThey make roughly 500k-3 million if they bill that rate. Potentially more if they have huge clients but that's rarer. Firm partners are heavily compensated based on how much work they bring in, at most firms. But it varies.
- hga 11y ago
- xacaxulu 11y agoThe title alone makes me all "Yissssssssssssss".
- winter_blue 11y ago$1.4 million seems small in comparison to the billions[1] that Microsoft was fined by the EU for bundling certain software with Windows. Acacia did something that would be considered illegal and exploitative in almost every jurisdiction, whereas bundling a browser straddles a legal gray area. Apple does it OS X and iOS, Google does it on Android & Chromebooks, and nearly every Linux distro does it. On iOS, you can't even use a browser engine other than Safari's WebKit. And none of these companies have gotten into trouble. It just seems unfair to me that when a company does something slightly unfairly competitive (like Microsoft) they get hit with huge fines, but when a company like Acacia does something that's outright evil and illegal, the fines are a joke. I do think Microsoft should be paying even bigger fines for patent-trolling Android manufacturers with false patent claims. And a judicial decision or executive act ordering Apple to allow users to install their own software on iOS, and removing the ban on interpreters/browser engines/etc on the App Store would be appropriate. [1] $794 million in 2003, $449 million in 2006, $1.44 billion in 2008, and $765 million (€561 mil)in 2013 -- a total of over $3.4 billion, all for bundling standard software with Windows that all other OSes also bundle. And this money paid in fines to the European Court goes back into the EU budget. (TBH, this smells strangely as a revenue-generating move by the Commission.) See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp_v_Commission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp_v_Commission
- monochromatic 11y agoYes, this number does seem small compared to some other completely unrelated number.
- reality_czech 11y agoSaying that Microsoft was fined for "bundling a browser" is like saying that the Feds went after Al Capone because of tax evasion. I hope this was a joke post! There were plenty of other cases pending against Microsoft, but they were all dropped when George W. Bush came into power. If Gore had won, Microsoft probably would have been broken up, like AT&T before it.
- oldmanjay 11y ago
- shmerl 11y agoGood, but I was hoping for Intellectual Vultures to be busted.
- ccvannorman 11y agoA good start.