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"I wasn't confused, but some of the jurors were". Does it seem crazy to anyone else to have non-experts making enormous rulings like this? This bumbling fool di

"I wasn't confused, but some of the jurors were". Does it seem crazy to anyone else to have non-experts making enormous rulings like this? This bumbling fool did some "calculations" to "zero in on 14%" ("I'm familiar with P&L statements") and decide that Samsung owes Apple a billion dollars!?!? I'm not saying that Samsung is innocent, but this seems like a ridiculous process.

wmeredith 14y ago
Unfortunately part of the Jury selection process is lawyers filling it up with the least informed, most gullible people they can find.
- alayne 14y ago
  If that's true statement, then there should be evidence, right? I don't have a citation, but I do know that there have been several studies of jury effectiveness. A cursory look at a few of them seems to indicate that they are effective.
- columbo 14y ago
  That's just as much Samsung's fault as it is Apples. They could have dismissed this guy or any other juror, possibly without giving an explanation, or they could have argued that he wouldn't be impartial. It bothers me that we seem to be attacking the jurors as if they were appointed in this case via back-door-meetings between the government and apple. Didn't Samsung get the opportunity to interview the candidates? Were they allowed to remove potential jurors from the pool? If this was the jury they all agreed on then the people to be angry at is Samsung's pool of lawyers, not the jurors they selected (or rather, jurors they didn't dismiss).
  - wmeredith 14y ago
    Yeah, I'm being too cynical.
  - azakai 14y ago
    > Were they allowed to remove potential jurors from the pool? Of course, but each side has a limited number of times to veto a jury member. Those run out pretty quickly.
    - adrr 14y ago
      Smart people are usually the ones who get out of jury duty.
josephlord 14y ago
They make life and death decisions in criminal cases. Why not make decisions for a few percent of companies turnover? Given the numbers of phones Samsung is selling the per device fine isn't that high. Compared to copyright infringement statutory damages in files sharing cases the amounts are tiny. Edit to add: Some fair points were made in replies about the complexity of the patent law compared with criminal/murder cases but the parent to this was commenting the scale of the damages decided rather than complexity and that was the focus of my comment. Yes it is scary but I'm not sure I can think of less scary options for really serious criminal cases.
- jlgreco 14y ago
  "They make life and death decisions in criminal cases. Why not make decisions for a few percent of companies turnover?" I don't know if you intended that to be comforting, but I really can't see it that way. And that is even if I ignore my suspicion (hope?) that the average juror will tread with more care if they are considering the life of another person, than if they are considering a corporation's money.
  - j_baker 14y ago
    You're joking right? Oftentimes the fact that lives are involved makes jurors even more irrational. The life of the victim usually takes precedence over the life of the accused. http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/innocence-and-death-penalty#inn-st http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/innocence-and-death-penalty#...
    - jlgreco 14y ago
      I wasn't joking, but now I am depressed.
  - josephlord 14y ago
    Not meant to be comforting but to put things in perspective.
- laumars 14y ago
batista 14y ago
>Does it seem crazy to anyone else to have non-experts making enormous rulings like this? No, it seems democratic. The law is about the will of the people --which is what the "jury of your peers" tries to capture--, not about what some experts say. Experts can serve the court with their "expert advice" (which lots of times in such cases is just BS, depending on which side pays their bills). It's dead easy as a lawyer to find experts with Phd's and all, to testify both pro and against patents, or both pro and against each company in this dispute).
bpatrianakos 14y ago
That's how our justice system works. I'm glad that any citizen gets to be on a jury rather than some elite set of experts. We can't have it both ways. If given the choice between "experts" and average citizens on a jury I'd go with average citizens every time. I don't care how dumb or smart they are. What I care about is if we decide that a certain kind of person should be on certain juries then that creates a new kind of class system and would hurt us more than help. The job of the lawyers throughout the trial was to explain these things to the jury and give them the information they need to make a decision. It's fine to have a jury full of people who have no clue about the patent system because the onus is on th lawyers in the trial to present the facts. If they fail to do so on either side then they have to deal with the consequences. It's not fair but it's equal. America's judicial system is not about fairness so much as it is equality. Equality isn't always fair but in a country like this it's the best we can do. Now what I'm about to say isn't an attack on you but instead just am observation. When people disagree with something they always try to explain why the bad thing happened. In this case it sounds like you're looking to explain away a decision you disagree with by saying the jurors should have been experts. If the jurors were experts and someone disagreed with the ruling then inevitably someone else would be sayng they should not be experts because of bias or some such reason.
- te_platt 14y ago
  So it looks like it's not good to have a jury decide and it's not good to have experts decide on the validity of a patents. Maybe it's that the idea of patents is flawed and the flaw manifests itself as a lack of a good way to determine if a patent is valid.
- brittohalloran 14y ago
  Honestly I do think that Samsung is guilty of copying Apple, so I'm not trying to explain it away. The fact that the jury determined the percentage is probably the part that peeved me the most. The numbers are so clearly based on anchoring (Samsung said 12%, Apple said 35%...) there's no way its accurate.
  - fakeer 14y ago
rustynails 14y ago
>I'm not saying that Samsung is innocent You've got to get past this mindset. Was there prior art? Did Apple really invent this? Were the patents specific, non-obvious, etc. No, No, ... When you add that the outcome stifles innovation and a you add a broken IP system, you have so many nails in the coffin, it isn't funny. Case closed.
vannevar 14y ago
It's also worth noting that while there is a right to a jury in a patent trial, it's not required. If both sides had agreed, the case could have been heard by the judge or a court-appointed special master. Obviously, one side or the other (maybe both) thought that a jury trial would work in their favor.
aretiste 14y ago
so you can see why choice of venue is so important. if this were tried outside of "the valley" you would not get people like this on the jury. your comment about anchoring is spot on.
zmmmmm 14y ago
It was interesting hearing Nilay Patel (the verge) talk about this. He's very pro-patent, so he has a particular point of view, but his take is "yes the jury was incompetent but that's exactly how it's supposed to be". The underlying point being, both sides have the chance to educate the jury during the course of the trial. They have weeks to show them evidence, help them understand the laws and patent process, etc. If at the end of that time the jury is still incompetent to make a decision then it is the fault of parties in litigation. It seems to me this is as much Samsung's mistake as anything; they allowed in a jury member who was both incompetent, pro-patent and highly assertive and persuasive, and then they failed to anticipate and counter his influence effectively during the trial. If they were paying attention to these things they might have got a much better outcome.

wmeredith 14y ago

Unfortunately part of the Jury selection process is lawyers filling it up with the least informed, most gullible people they can find.

alayne 14y ago
If that's true statement, then there should be evidence, right? I don't have a citation, but I do know that there have been several studies of jury effectiveness. A cursory look at a few of them seems to indicate that they are effective.
columbo 14y ago
That's just as much Samsung's fault as it is Apples. They could have dismissed this guy or any other juror, possibly without giving an explanation, or they could have argued that he wouldn't be impartial. It bothers me that we seem to be attacking the jurors as if they were appointed in this case via back-door-meetings between the government and apple. Didn't Samsung get the opportunity to interview the candidates? Were they allowed to remove potential jurors from the pool? If this was the jury they all agreed on then the people to be angry at is Samsung's pool of lawyers, not the jurors they selected (or rather, jurors they didn't dismiss).
- wmeredith 14y ago
  Yeah, I'm being too cynical.
- azakai 14y ago
  > Were they allowed to remove potential jurors from the pool? Of course, but each side has a limited number of times to veto a jury member. Those run out pretty quickly.
  - adrr 14y ago
    Smart people are usually the ones who get out of jury duty.

josephlord 14y ago

They make life and death decisions in criminal cases. Why not make decisions for a few percent of companies turnover? Given the numbers of phones Samsung is selling the per device fine isn't that high. Compared to copyright infringement statutory damages in files sharing cases the amounts are tiny. Edit to add: Some fair points were made in replies about the complexity of the patent law compared with criminal/murder cases but the parent to this was commenting the scale of the damages decided rather than complexity and that was the focus of my comment. Yes it is scary but I'm not sure I can think of less scary options for really serious criminal cases.

jlgreco 14y ago
"They make life and death decisions in criminal cases. Why not make decisions for a few percent of companies turnover?" I don't know if you intended that to be comforting, but I really can't see it that way. And that is even if I ignore my suspicion (hope?) that the average juror will tread with more care if they are considering the life of another person, than if they are considering a corporation's money.
- j_baker 14y ago
  You're joking right? Oftentimes the fact that lives are involved makes jurors even more irrational. The life of the victim usually takes precedence over the life of the accused. http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/innocence-and-death-penalty#inn-st http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/innocence-and-death-penalty#...
  - jlgreco 14y ago
    I wasn't joking, but now I am depressed.
- josephlord 14y ago
  Not meant to be comforting but to put things in perspective.
laumars 14y ago

batista 14y ago

>Does it seem crazy to anyone else to have non-experts making enormous rulings like this? No, it seems democratic. The law is about the will of the people --which is what the "jury of your peers" tries to capture--, not about what some experts say. Experts can serve the court with their "expert advice" (which lots of times in such cases is just BS, depending on which side pays their bills). It's dead easy as a lawyer to find experts with Phd's and all, to testify both pro and against patents, or both pro and against each company in this dispute).

bpatrianakos 14y ago

That's how our justice system works. I'm glad that any citizen gets to be on a jury rather than some elite set of experts. We can't have it both ways. If given the choice between "experts" and average citizens on a jury I'd go with average citizens every time. I don't care how dumb or smart they are. What I care about is if we decide that a certain kind of person should be on certain juries then that creates a new kind of class system and would hurt us more than help. The job of the lawyers throughout the trial was to explain these things to the jury and give them the information they need to make a decision. It's fine to have a jury full of people who have no clue about the patent system because the onus is on th lawyers in the trial to present the facts. If they fail to do so on either side then they have to deal with the consequences. It's not fair but it's equal. America's judicial system is not about fairness so much as it is equality. Equality isn't always fair but in a country like this it's the best we can do. Now what I'm about to say isn't an attack on you but instead just am observation. When people disagree with something they always try to explain why the bad thing happened. In this case it sounds like you're looking to explain away a decision you disagree with by saying the jurors should have been experts. If the jurors were experts and someone disagreed with the ruling then inevitably someone else would be sayng they should not be experts because of bias or some such reason.

te_platt 14y ago
So it looks like it's not good to have a jury decide and it's not good to have experts decide on the validity of a patents. Maybe it's that the idea of patents is flawed and the flaw manifests itself as a lack of a good way to determine if a patent is valid.
brittohalloran 14y ago
Honestly I do think that Samsung is guilty of copying Apple, so I'm not trying to explain it away. The fact that the jury determined the percentage is probably the part that peeved me the most. The numbers are so clearly based on anchoring (Samsung said 12%, Apple said 35%...) there's no way its accurate.
- fakeer 14y ago

rustynails 14y ago

>I'm not saying that Samsung is innocent You've got to get past this mindset. Was there prior art? Did Apple really invent this? Were the patents specific, non-obvious, etc. No, No, ... When you add that the outcome stifles innovation and a you add a broken IP system, you have so many nails in the coffin, it isn't funny. Case closed.

vannevar 14y ago

It's also worth noting that while there is a right to a jury in a patent trial, it's not required. If both sides had agreed, the case could have been heard by the judge or a court-appointed special master. Obviously, one side or the other (maybe both) thought that a jury trial would work in their favor.

aretiste 14y ago

so you can see why choice of venue is so important. if this were tried outside of "the valley" you would not get people like this on the jury. your comment about anchoring is spot on.

zmmmmm 14y ago

It was interesting hearing Nilay Patel (the verge) talk about this. He's very pro-patent, so he has a particular point of view, but his take is "yes the jury was incompetent but that's exactly how it's supposed to be". The underlying point being, both sides have the chance to educate the jury during the course of the trial. They have weeks to show them evidence, help them understand the laws and patent process, etc. If at the end of that time the jury is still incompetent to make a decision then it is the fault of parties in litigation. It seems to me this is as much Samsung's mistake as anything; they allowed in a jury member who was both incompetent, pro-patent and highly assertive and persuasive, and then they failed to anticipate and counter his influence effectively during the trial. If they were paying attention to these things they might have got a much better outcome.