"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, t

"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.