6 ms·

Addressing the Chilling Effect of Patent Damages

85 points by e15ctr0n 11y ago

jimrandomh 11y ago
This is about the triple-damages rule, which says that if you're found to infringe on a patent willingly then the damages are increased, while if you didn't know about it, they aren't. This, combined with a large number of very-low-quality ambiguous patents and the fact that the patent office's screening only creates a legal presumption of validity but not a practical one, means that everyone is strongly incentivized to avoid ever looking at anything the patent office publishes. Which makes things even worse, because the problem is hidden and the patent office can't draw on public knowledge to shoot down bad patents.
- eganist 11y ago
  I appreciate your explanation, though I can also appreciate why the rule was introduced. It would seem the consequences of it were entirely unforeseen. A devil's advocate argument: should the rule be tossed, might there not suddenly be a bottleneck imposed on new projects where legal teams would now have to research whether a particular feature duplicates an existing patent? I'd say it's an unwinnable game since doing away with software patents might also harm any commercial motivation to produce a service with even a hint of transparency into how that service does what it does. I almost feel like the Treble damages rule is the least-bad of all of them, but that's just a gut feeling. Any armchair-lawyers (or actual ones!) want to weigh in? I'm not anywhere near qualified to actually express an opinion on this.
  - kevingadd 11y ago
    The current state of affairs as described in the brief (accurately, in my experience) is catastrophically bad. Even if you completely abolished software patents I don't think it could be worse than this.
  - jeswin 11y ago
    > doing away with software patents might also harm any commercial motivation to produce a service with even a hint of transparency into how that service does what it does Do you have examples of FOSS or other projects benefiting from companies revealing information through patent filing? To rephrase, what exactly do we lose out if patents didn't exist? Even if there is some marginal value in the knowledge sharing that happens in patent filings, not allowing software patents would be a much bigger benefit. To support this point, we can look at the prevalence and utility of Open Source software projects; which work without patent protection.
    - forgotpwtomain 11y ago
      > To rephrase, what exactly do we lose out if patents didn't exist? If you're talking about mundane things like a slider on a phone lock-screen - than obviously nearly nothing. On the otherhand if you are talking about a result of research that might have taken 5-10 years - than patent protection is a big deal and very few private companies would be incentivized to engage in such research without a patent system.
      - nothrabannosir 11y ago
        Yes, that is, indeed, the point if patents. That's what the OP asked: what 5-10y software research, which we currently benefit from, would not have happened were it not for patents? In medicine, this is extremely easy to answer. Hence why the vast majority of software patents opponents are fine with those.
        forgotpwtomain 11y ago
        > That's what the OP asked: what 5-10y software research, which we currently benefit from, would not have happened were it not for patents? First of all that is explicitly not what OP asked - he asked: >> To rephrase, what exactly do we lose out if patents didn't exist? > In medicine, this is extremely easy to answer. Hence why the vast majority of software patents opponents are fine with those. Then it seems you've answered your own question? Obviously the patent being in software as opposed to being in medicine doesn't make any distinction -- since there is no logical way to qualify that criteria into a rule that can be unequivocally applied; that the patent system is greatly beneficial in other major areas of research (and supposing you admit the net benefit to be greater than the net harm) makes it inevitable in software - whether you like it or not.
  - belorn 11y ago
    I would like to see a study that compare the commercial incentive vs the deincentives cause by the chilling effects from patents. It should be a standard cost-benefit analyzes with no emotional/political bias that could give a final scientific answer if patents are beneficial for software or not.
    - throwawaykf05 11y ago
      There are tons of studies around patents and the economics thereof, but you will not find such a convenient answer to your question. The reason is that it's very hard to measure the costs and benefits to quantify these incentives and dis-incentives. Furthermore the benefits and costs of patent systems are often orthogonal. If you want to get an idea of the depth of the field, look at all the studies cited by this paper, and look at all the various methods, metrics and datasets that have been considered so far: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2139260 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2139260
- WildUtah 11y ago
  "the triple-damages rule, which says that if you're found to infringe on a patent willingly then the damages are increased, while if you didn't know about it, they aren't." That's the triple damages rule as invented from whole cloth by the Circuit Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC), the patent court. The actual law is that "the court may increase the damages up to three times the amount found or assessed" (35 USC §284). There is no special rule about knowing infringement or willful infringement. The CAFC has been limiting triple damages because having no standards in a free for all of triple damages based only on judges' feelings would be terrible. So the CAFC picked out one egregious behavior by rich infringers -- willful infringement -- and limited the triple damages to that offense. It was a reasonable compromise but has no support in the text of the law. The Supreme Court looks askance at such compromises outside the statute and may decide to overturn this one. That will lead to more shopping for district judges inclined to cheat and abuse the defendants in patent lawsuits now that there will be no limits on tripling. And that points to -- you guessed it -- the Eastern District of Texas. There is another case before the CAFC -- not the Supremes -- TC Heartland scheduled for oral argument on 11 March, where the CAFC could simply abolish Eastern Texas patent litigation with the stroke of a pen. The law (28 USC §1400) says that you can be sued over patents only in your home jurisdiction and not in East Texas (since tech companies don't start up in Texarkana). The CAFC abolished that law by simply choosing to contradict it a couple decades ago and created the troll jurisdictions. But now the CAFC is considering bringing it back and obeying the law as written. It's interesting to see the CAFC in both cases being the sane ones. For the most part historically the CAFC has been loony and corrupt in promoting maximum damage to innovation for the benefit of patent lawyers with no respect to the law or reason. Some of the new Obama appointees and the resignation of the Chief Judge Rader under federal investigation for corruption last year may have reduced the lunacy temporarily.
rdtsc 11y ago
And interesting effect indeed. I can imagine someone seeing their company releasing some new technology. And then realizing there is an existing patent on that issued to another company. What is that employee to do? If they say something, all of the sudden they 3x the liability their company would face if litigation happens. If they don't say anything, the product will continue to be released and it would increase the chance of the patent owner suing as well.
- greglindahl 11y ago
  The standard Silicon Valley answer is to say nothing. Patent owners rarely sue, so the latter risk isn't much of one.
BatFastard 11y ago
Patent system is a great system, for 100 years ago. Throw it out, it would do more for innovation than all of the VC money invested over 10 years.
- antome 11y ago
  It's more of an optimisation problem. You want inventors to invent a lot of things, so you give them patents. But if you give them too long a patent, they will just invent a few things, then sit on the IP. Nowadays, there should really be ~5 year hardware patents, and ~1 year software patents, which mostly reflects the time-to-market after invention.
  - em3rgent0rdr 11y ago
    The optimization should be ~0 year hardware patents, and ~0 year software patents. All the patents will do is slow down market deployment and innovation.
- abecedarius 11y ago
  I'm not convinced it was a net plus even 100 years ago. E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers_patent_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers_patent_war
- rasz_pl 11y ago
  it wouldnt, one of the major valuation factors for new companies is IP (patents).
boulos 11y ago
What an interesting group that banded together... > Check Point Software Technologies, Inc., LinkedIn Corporation, Mozilla Corporation, Netflix, Inc., Pinterest, Inc., Roku, Inc. and Twitter, Inc. (Amici) are technology and Internet companies. I understand why the media ones are together (MPEG, etc.) but I don't understand Checkpoint (LinkedIn as I remembered by writing this purchased Lynda.com, so it cares a lot about serving video). Can anyone explain?
- ta0967 11y ago
  CheckPoint firewalls do DPI (Deep Packet Inspection). i would imagine that to make sense of a packet purportedly carrying a piece of a video stream you'd need to perform operations amounting to decoding the stream.
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  A ridiculous amount of modern tech is patented in some way. All of those companies can be hit with lawsuits over patents with too much control of outcome in hands of patent holders. The enemies of their enemies are their friends.
Animats 11y ago
Without treble damages, there's no incentive to license a patent. Worst case is paying roughly the same fee it takes to license. The trouble with requiring "willfulness" is that it requires proving the state of mind of the infringer. This is difficult, and it's not even clear what "state of mind" means for a corporation. See in re Segate, where the CAFC tried to define "willful infringment" with an objective test.[1] A stronger remedy than triple damages exists in patent law - an injunction against infringement. Some years ago, Polaroid won an injunction against Kodak for infringing their instant photography patents. Kodak was given 30 days to exit the instant photography business and had to buy all their cameras for that process back from consumers. They did, and that was the end of Kodak's instant photography business. The injunction remedy still exists, but is no longer routinely available since eBay vs. MercExchange. in 2006.[2] Without patents, there's little incentive to innovate unless you can throw enough money at a startup to get dominant market share before someone else copies you. VCs used to want to see a strong intellectual property position before putting in money; then they had some assurance of not losing their investment even if the technology works. This has been less of an issue for non-technology startups; Doordash, etc. are not technology companies. The case to which this brief is attached is not about software. It's about a new way to attach transformers to printed circuit boards with surface-mount soldering. Halo, a small startup, developed a way to do this which solved a problem with the solder joints cracking during heating. Pulse, a much bigger company whose transformers tended to crack loose after soldering, copied this and refused to pay royalties. Halo has won the infringement issue; the only remaining question is how much Pulse has to pay them. [1] http://www.law360.com/articles/102863/seagate-the-issue-of-willful-patent-infringement http://www.law360.com/articles/102863/seagate-the-issue-of-w... [2] http://www.bna.com/supreme-courts-ebay-n17179924841/ http://www.bna.com/supreme-courts-ebay-n17179924841/
- tbrownaw 11y ago
  Without patents, there's little incentive to innovate unless you can throw enough money at a startup to get dominant market share before someone else copies you. I don't believe this matches what we know of history. It also doesn't match personal experience -- I've worked on open source projects because they're fun, and on trying to grow better ETL tools because they make the rest of my job easier. It probably does change who does the innovating, tho. Patents mean that instead of people innovating things to make their own lives easier, you get outsiders throwing money at trying to innovate around what they've guessed other people's problems to be.
CuriousSkeptic 11y ago
"Designing around patents is, in fact, one of the ways in which the patent system works to the advantage of the public in promoting progress in the useful arts, its constitutional purpose." To me that just sounds stupid. It's akin to the argument that breaking windows promtes growth by stimulating the glass industry.
- throwawaykf05 11y ago
  Not really, when you consider that the vast majority of will take the path of least resistance, and that innovation is often a risky and expensive effort most would rather eschew. There are many examples of innovation-by-forced-workaround happening. Consider the fact that development of Ogg Vorbis languished until the MP3 patents started getting licensed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorbis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorbis). This kicked the Ogg Vorbis project into overdrive, resulting in a format and codec that many consider superior to MP3. Here's another example, from Stallman himself: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/stallman-mec-india.html http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/stallman-mec-india.html - he recounts an example of where they had to work around the LZW patents, resulting in GZIP, which "gave better compression results". This further eventually led to the creation of PNG when the GIF patent was asserted. The clear implication, of course, is that they'd have preferred re-using LZW (as all good coders should), but then they would not have invented GZIP and PNG.
- laotzu 11y ago
  It's doublespeak. Like the CNN article whose title reads "Encryption a growing threat to security". In software, working around existing patents has resulted in vast fragmentation on every platform. Thereby greatly increasing the time investment needed per developer when creating cross platform compatible apps. Want to reach your audience with a simple app? Learn to use all of the native android dev suite tools and language. Learn all of the native iOS dev suite too. Make a Web app. Make that web app compatible for all browser platforms: IE, Mozilla, Chrome, Safari. Make that web app responsive for mobile users for all the different device types they might be using... If you want to stimulate innovation, cooperation is imperative. A cooperative society would realize that the more unified and open your innovation processes are, the less time investment is needed for everyone else.
skywhopper 11y ago
The sanity of any laws built on top of the patent system require that granted patents make sense and represent actual "inventions". A patented invention should provide enough detail in the patent filing to allow other experts in the same field to recreate the "invention". For any sensible definition of a patent that could be related to software, such a filing would include actual source code (or at least very detailed pseudocode. Alas, until issued patents actually represent real inventions, then all the rest of the laws surrounding their use and enforcement will appear utterly insane as well.
throwawaykf05 11y ago
Recent reports suggest the threat of treble damages is, statistically speaking, largely theoretical. Only about 0.6% of cases ever get enhanced damages, and even then the amounts are typically pretty low. Source: http://www.law360.com/articles/557734/the-truth-about-patent-damage-awards http://www.law360.com/articles/557734/the-truth-about-patent... (Article may be paywalled - clicking via Google may help.)

85 points by e15ctr0n 11y ago

This is about the triple-damages rule, which says that if you're found to infringe on a patent willingly then the damages are increased, while if you didn't know about it, they aren't. This, combined with a large number of very-low-quality ambiguous patents and the fact that the patent office's screening only creates a legal presumption of validity but not a practical one, means that everyone is strongly incentivized to avoid ever looking at anything the patent office publishes. Which makes things even worse, because the problem is hidden and the patent office can't draw on public knowledge to shoot down bad patents.

eganist 11y ago
I appreciate your explanation, though I can also appreciate why the rule was introduced. It would seem the consequences of it were entirely unforeseen. A devil's advocate argument: should the rule be tossed, might there not suddenly be a bottleneck imposed on new projects where legal teams would now have to research whether a particular feature duplicates an existing patent? I'd say it's an unwinnable game since doing away with software patents might also harm any commercial motivation to produce a service with even a hint of transparency into how that service does what it does. I almost feel like the Treble damages rule is the least-bad of all of them, but that's just a gut feeling. Any armchair-lawyers (or actual ones!) want to weigh in? I'm not anywhere near qualified to actually express an opinion on this.
- kevingadd 11y ago
  The current state of affairs as described in the brief (accurately, in my experience) is catastrophically bad. Even if you completely abolished software patents I don't think it could be worse than this.
- jeswin 11y ago
  > doing away with software patents might also harm any commercial motivation to produce a service with even a hint of transparency into how that service does what it does Do you have examples of FOSS or other projects benefiting from companies revealing information through patent filing? To rephrase, what exactly do we lose out if patents didn't exist? Even if there is some marginal value in the knowledge sharing that happens in patent filings, not allowing software patents would be a much bigger benefit. To support this point, we can look at the prevalence and utility of Open Source software projects; which work without patent protection.
  - forgotpwtomain 11y ago
    > To rephrase, what exactly do we lose out if patents didn't exist? If you're talking about mundane things like a slider on a phone lock-screen - than obviously nearly nothing. On the otherhand if you are talking about a result of research that might have taken 5-10 years - than patent protection is a big deal and very few private companies would be incentivized to engage in such research without a patent system.
    - nothrabannosir 11y ago
      Yes, that is, indeed, the point if patents. That's what the OP asked: what 5-10y software research, which we currently benefit from, would not have happened were it not for patents? In medicine, this is extremely easy to answer. Hence why the vast majority of software patents opponents are fine with those.
      - forgotpwtomain 11y ago
        > That's what the OP asked: what 5-10y software research, which we currently benefit from, would not have happened were it not for patents? First of all that is explicitly not what OP asked - he asked: >> To rephrase, what exactly do we lose out if patents didn't exist? > In medicine, this is extremely easy to answer. Hence why the vast majority of software patents opponents are fine with those. Then it seems you've answered your own question? Obviously the patent being in software as opposed to being in medicine doesn't make any distinction -- since there is no logical way to qualify that criteria into a rule that can be unequivocally applied; that the patent system is greatly beneficial in other major areas of research (and supposing you admit the net benefit to be greater than the net harm) makes it inevitable in software - whether you like it or not.
- belorn 11y ago
  I would like to see a study that compare the commercial incentive vs the deincentives cause by the chilling effects from patents. It should be a standard cost-benefit analyzes with no emotional/political bias that could give a final scientific answer if patents are beneficial for software or not.
  - throwawaykf05 11y ago
    There are tons of studies around patents and the economics thereof, but you will not find such a convenient answer to your question. The reason is that it's very hard to measure the costs and benefits to quantify these incentives and dis-incentives. Furthermore the benefits and costs of patent systems are often orthogonal. If you want to get an idea of the depth of the field, look at all the studies cited by this paper, and look at all the various methods, metrics and datasets that have been considered so far: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2139260 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2139260
WildUtah 11y ago
"the triple-damages rule, which says that if you're found to infringe on a patent willingly then the damages are increased, while if you didn't know about it, they aren't." That's the triple damages rule as invented from whole cloth by the Circuit Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC), the patent court. The actual law is that "the court may increase the damages up to three times the amount found or assessed" (35 USC §284). There is no special rule about knowing infringement or willful infringement. The CAFC has been limiting triple damages because having no standards in a free for all of triple damages based only on judges' feelings would be terrible. So the CAFC picked out one egregious behavior by rich infringers -- willful infringement -- and limited the triple damages to that offense. It was a reasonable compromise but has no support in the text of the law. The Supreme Court looks askance at such compromises outside the statute and may decide to overturn this one. That will lead to more shopping for district judges inclined to cheat and abuse the defendants in patent lawsuits now that there will be no limits on tripling. And that points to -- you guessed it -- the Eastern District of Texas. There is another case before the CAFC -- not the Supremes -- TC Heartland scheduled for oral argument on 11 March, where the CAFC could simply abolish Eastern Texas patent litigation with the stroke of a pen. The law (28 USC §1400) says that you can be sued over patents only in your home jurisdiction and not in East Texas (since tech companies don't start up in Texarkana). The CAFC abolished that law by simply choosing to contradict it a couple decades ago and created the troll jurisdictions. But now the CAFC is considering bringing it back and obeying the law as written. It's interesting to see the CAFC in both cases being the sane ones. For the most part historically the CAFC has been loony and corrupt in promoting maximum damage to innovation for the benefit of patent lawyers with no respect to the law or reason. Some of the new Obama appointees and the resignation of the Chief Judge Rader under federal investigation for corruption last year may have reduced the lunacy temporarily.

rdtsc 11y ago

And interesting effect indeed. I can imagine someone seeing their company releasing some new technology. And then realizing there is an existing patent on that issued to another company. What is that employee to do? If they say something, all of the sudden they 3x the liability their company would face if litigation happens. If they don't say anything, the product will continue to be released and it would increase the chance of the patent owner suing as well.

greglindahl 11y ago
The standard Silicon Valley answer is to say nothing. Patent owners rarely sue, so the latter risk isn't much of one.

BatFastard 11y ago

Patent system is a great system, for 100 years ago. Throw it out, it would do more for innovation than all of the VC money invested over 10 years.

antome 11y ago
It's more of an optimisation problem. You want inventors to invent a lot of things, so you give them patents. But if you give them too long a patent, they will just invent a few things, then sit on the IP. Nowadays, there should really be ~5 year hardware patents, and ~1 year software patents, which mostly reflects the time-to-market after invention.
- em3rgent0rdr 11y ago
  The optimization should be ~0 year hardware patents, and ~0 year software patents. All the patents will do is slow down market deployment and innovation.
abecedarius 11y ago
I'm not convinced it was a net plus even 100 years ago. E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers_patent_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers_patent_war
rasz_pl 11y ago
it wouldnt, one of the major valuation factors for new companies is IP (patents).

boulos 11y ago

What an interesting group that banded together... > Check Point Software Technologies, Inc., LinkedIn Corporation, Mozilla Corporation, Netflix, Inc., Pinterest, Inc., Roku, Inc. and Twitter, Inc. (Amici) are technology and Internet companies. I understand why the media ones are together (MPEG, etc.) but I don't understand Checkpoint (LinkedIn as I remembered by writing this purchased Lynda.com, so it cares a lot about serving video). Can anyone explain?

ta0967 11y ago
CheckPoint firewalls do DPI (Deep Packet Inspection). i would imagine that to make sense of a packet purportedly carrying a piece of a video stream you'd need to perform operations amounting to decoding the stream.
nickpsecurity 11y ago
A ridiculous amount of modern tech is patented in some way. All of those companies can be hit with lawsuits over patents with too much control of outcome in hands of patent holders. The enemies of their enemies are their friends.

Animats 11y ago

Without treble damages, there's no incentive to license a patent. Worst case is paying roughly the same fee it takes to license. The trouble with requiring "willfulness" is that it requires proving the state of mind of the infringer. This is difficult, and it's not even clear what "state of mind" means for a corporation. See in re Segate, where the CAFC tried to define "willful infringment" with an objective test.[1] A stronger remedy than triple damages exists in patent law - an injunction against infringement. Some years ago, Polaroid won an injunction against Kodak for infringing their instant photography patents. Kodak was given 30 days to exit the instant photography business and had to buy all their cameras for that process back from consumers. They did, and that was the end of Kodak's instant photography business. The injunction remedy still exists, but is no longer routinely available since eBay vs. MercExchange. in 2006.[2] Without patents, there's little incentive to innovate unless you can throw enough money at a startup to get dominant market share before someone else copies you. VCs used to want to see a strong intellectual property position before putting in money; then they had some assurance of not losing their investment even if the technology works. This has been less of an issue for non-technology startups; Doordash, etc. are not technology companies. The case to which this brief is attached is not about software. It's about a new way to attach transformers to printed circuit boards with surface-mount soldering. Halo, a small startup, developed a way to do this which solved a problem with the solder joints cracking during heating. Pulse, a much bigger company whose transformers tended to crack loose after soldering, copied this and refused to pay royalties. Halo has won the infringement issue; the only remaining question is how much Pulse has to pay them. [1] http://www.law360.com/articles/102863/seagate-the-issue-of-willful-patent-infringement http://www.law360.com/articles/102863/seagate-the-issue-of-w... [2] http://www.bna.com/supreme-courts-ebay-n17179924841/ http://www.bna.com/supreme-courts-ebay-n17179924841/

tbrownaw 11y ago
Without patents, there's little incentive to innovate unless you can throw enough money at a startup to get dominant market share before someone else copies you. I don't believe this matches what we know of history. It also doesn't match personal experience -- I've worked on open source projects because they're fun, and on trying to grow better ETL tools because they make the rest of my job easier. It probably does change who does the innovating, tho. Patents mean that instead of people innovating things to make their own lives easier, you get outsiders throwing money at trying to innovate around what they've guessed other people's problems to be.

CuriousSkeptic 11y ago

"Designing around patents is, in fact, one of the ways in which the patent system works to the advantage of the public in promoting progress in the useful arts, its constitutional purpose." To me that just sounds stupid. It's akin to the argument that breaking windows promtes growth by stimulating the glass industry.

throwawaykf05 11y ago
Not really, when you consider that the vast majority of will take the path of least resistance, and that innovation is often a risky and expensive effort most would rather eschew. There are many examples of innovation-by-forced-workaround happening. Consider the fact that development of Ogg Vorbis languished until the MP3 patents started getting licensed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorbis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorbis). This kicked the Ogg Vorbis project into overdrive, resulting in a format and codec that many consider superior to MP3. Here's another example, from Stallman himself: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/stallman-mec-india.html http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/stallman-mec-india.html - he recounts an example of where they had to work around the LZW patents, resulting in GZIP, which "gave better compression results". This further eventually led to the creation of PNG when the GIF patent was asserted. The clear implication, of course, is that they'd have preferred re-using LZW (as all good coders should), but then they would not have invented GZIP and PNG.
laotzu 11y ago
It's doublespeak. Like the CNN article whose title reads "Encryption a growing threat to security". In software, working around existing patents has resulted in vast fragmentation on every platform. Thereby greatly increasing the time investment needed per developer when creating cross platform compatible apps. Want to reach your audience with a simple app? Learn to use all of the native android dev suite tools and language. Learn all of the native iOS dev suite too. Make a Web app. Make that web app compatible for all browser platforms: IE, Mozilla, Chrome, Safari. Make that web app responsive for mobile users for all the different device types they might be using... If you want to stimulate innovation, cooperation is imperative. A cooperative society would realize that the more unified and open your innovation processes are, the less time investment is needed for everyone else.

skywhopper 11y ago

The sanity of any laws built on top of the patent system require that granted patents make sense and represent actual "inventions". A patented invention should provide enough detail in the patent filing to allow other experts in the same field to recreate the "invention". For any sensible definition of a patent that could be related to software, such a filing would include actual source code (or at least very detailed pseudocode. Alas, until issued patents actually represent real inventions, then all the rest of the laws surrounding their use and enforcement will appear utterly insane as well.

throwawaykf05 11y ago

Recent reports suggest the threat of treble damages is, statistically speaking, largely theoretical. Only about 0.6% of cases ever get enhanced damages, and even then the amounts are typically pretty low. Source: http://www.law360.com/articles/557734/the-truth-about-patent-damage-awards http://www.law360.com/articles/557734/the-truth-about-patent... (Article may be paywalled - clicking via Google may help.)