18 ms·
Article starts with the most important two words: MARSHALL, TX From Wikipedia: Marshall has a reputation for plaintiff-friendly juries for the 5% of patent l
by sytelus 13y ago
Article starts with the most important two words:
MARSHALL, TX
From Wikipedia:
Marshall has a reputation for plaintiff-friendly juries for the 5% of patent lawsuits that reach trial, resulting in 78% plaintiff wins.
I've stopped myself getting surprised for any patent suits where troll gloriously wins and that decision comes from a court in Marshall. This town's economy probably runs on lawsuits that trolls bring in and jury members from the town seem to have special incentive to favor plaintiffs almost 4 out of 5 times!
- tedunangst 13y agoWithout knowing the percentage of cases that result in plaintiff wins in other cities, you can't draw any meaningful conclusions from that stat.
- DannyBee 13y agoWell, he is actually right that the town is essentially funded by patent lawsuits. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/24/business/24ward.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/24/business/24ward.html?_r=0
- brador 13y agoDoesn't that make the trial unfair? Isn't "no associated interest" a basic marker of a fair trial?
- amalag 13y agoThats a tough one for an appeal though, showing the jury was unfair.
- DannyBee 13y agoIt's very hard to show actual jury bias. Though i bet if the anti-patent groups got together and bought marshall a new football stadium, the win rates would go down ....
- throwawaykf 13y agoWell, are the claimants buying them a new football stadium? The Lemley paper I posted below certainly seems to indicate no great preference for plaintiffs over defendants.
- rurounijones 13y agoPatent holders win 78 percent of the time [In Marshall], compared with an average of 59 percent nationwide, according to LegalMetric, a company that tracks patent litigation.
- agravier 13y agoWhat is the variance? skewness?
- gjm11 13y agoHow are you wanting to measure those for a Bernoulli variable? In any given case, the plaintiff either wins or loses. Assuming different cases are independent (which is probably at least a decent assumption), there's no more to say about the distribution than the win probability. You could of course ask about the variance, skewness, kurtosis, 17th moment, etc., of the distribution of damages awarded or length of trial or total lawyers' fees or something. But for the actual win-or-lose figures, the question doesn't make sense. Well, it kinda makes sense. Define the outcome to be 0 if the plaintiff loses and 1 if the plaintiff wins. Then with a win probability of 0.78 the variance is 0.17, the skewness is -1.35, the excess kurtosis is -0.17, etc., but there's no more information in any of these numbers than was already provided when we learned that the probability was 0.78.
- ronaldx 13y agoI understood differently, that the parent was asking for the distribution of win rates per town.
- agravier 13y agoI don't understand what you don't understand, given that you are yourself taking each county/town (not sure what is the atomic unit of judicial division here) as one RV to which you associate a winning rate. There are surely enough of them to get them in bins of winning rate. Anyway, my point was to highlight that the mean alone is not very informative.
- throwawaykf 13y agoHere's a much more detailed analysis with a lot more data and nuance: Mark Lemley, "Where to file your patent case" http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1597919 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1597919 EDT is not actually at the top for claimant win rates.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- rplnt 13y agoCan you just pick any court you want? And the appeal would be held where?
- fpp 13y agoIt would be interesting to see some of the cases where the plaintiffs have not won in Marshall. As this place in Texas has over the last 10 years built an industry around the IP cases going to trial there (with e.g. short-term office rental rates as high as in NYC) - maybe those are cases that are not "supporting" their continuing gold rush. None of that of course touches on the fundamental flaw in the system that IP cases are so exorbitantly expensive that most have to pay those modern "highwaymen" even when knowing that their demands are most of the time completely without base and are solely a legalized form of extortion. Just consider how you feel, when you worked for years and developed / invented a large scale real-world solution and those crooks with IP / patents originally being provided to protect their work on bicycles and abacuses are lining up outside your office all claiming that they would have done all the work. So the first step to cure this must be a protection of business that have invested substantial time and money into their products, are bona fide and actually running a business based on their work, to be able to defend themselves against such frivolous law abuses.
- peroo 13y agoPlanet Money has a story on one such case: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/06/07/188370495/when-patents-attack-part-two http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/06/07/188370495/when-pat... In that particular case, which was regarding a ridiculously broad patent for offsite network-backups, the plaintiff lost on a technicality; there was proof of a co-inventor who hadn't been included in the patent-filing. If it wasn't for that oversight they would almost certainly have won the case.
- noonespecial 13y ago...all claiming that they would have done all the work. Its worse than that. They claim that the speculative idea was all of the work, and you're nothing but a thief who stole it and did the easy part of, you know, actually doing stuff.
- fpp 13y agoThose are my favorite too - I normally call them Jules Verne patents - dreamt up something, written a fictional essay aka patent on it, then claiming money from the first one who actually built it and actually invented it. If this continues, soon someone might claim that Gerdt von Bassewitz invented space travel (Peter and Anneli's Journey to the Moon - the German title is actually nicer - translated: Little Peter's travel to the Moon -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_and_Anneli%27s_Journey_to_the_Moon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_and_Anneli%27s_Journey_to... ) Ideas come in thousands and if not executed are not worth a dime. Doing it is the hard part and that's why companies building things generally get paid / make more money than science fiction book writers.
- perlpimp 13y agoCan you appeal these cases? I mean 2 million dollars is no pocket change and instead you can afford some good lawyers for that much money. I mean to appeal the case judgement in another state...
- chimeracoder 13y agoNot probably. The economy does run on the lawsuits. I remember reading a while back that the hotel closest to the courthouse was owned by the son of one of the judges. Can't find the source right now, though.
- driverdan 13y agoI wonder if running an anti-patent troll marketing campaign in Marshall would help fix this. Educate the population about the problem.
- pistle 13y agoThey call that quaint there... These aren't stupid hicks. If you think for a second that these folks don't see this as an awesome way to give a big Texas flying finger to Silicon Valley types with their skinny jeans, silly beards, and smugnaciousness... you've merely increased their will to continue this process.
- simplemath 13y agoEschewing justice in favor of giving "a big Texas flying finger to Silicon Valley types with their skinny jeans, silly beards, and smugnaciousness" pretty much makes them stupid hicks, sorry.
- gknoy 13y agoIf true, it would make them jerks, but it would be foolish to dismiss them as stupid.
- npsimons 13y ago"Shortsighted" and "ignorant of justice" come to mind as synonyms for "stupid".
- Iftheshoefits 13y agoThere's a difference between "clever" and "not stupid." One can be a stupid "clever" person. These people are "clever," because they know what butters their bread. That doesn't mean they aren't also dumb hicks.
- CamperBob2 13y agoI'm from that area. "Stupid hicks" isn't entirely inaccurate. As in other areas ranging from religion to economics, these salt-of-the-Earth folks are culturally conditioned to adopt the views of whoever gets to speak first.
- drzaiusapelord 13y agoI posted something similar in the previous HN thread where claims were made about how these jurors are the best jurors in IP cases because they're so "experienced" and this was a slam dunk victory for Newegg. Afterall, Diffie spoke, so that seals the deal, right? My skepticism of those claims didn't go over too well. Well, I was right. I really wish people better appreciated how corrupt and broken the patent process is and how appealing to ultra-conservative districts isn't some solution. Its part of the problem. If anything, this verdict should prove that we are farther from a solution than ever. Maybe we'll have better luck with the next congress.
- concernedctzn 13y agoWhat if everyone decided to put a tech embargo on this town? Refusing to do business with the inhabitants.
- bdcravens 13y agoThat ignores the way wholesale channels work, and I'm pretty sure a judge's son would setup shop by acquiring said embargoed products elsewhere. It would have less than 1% of an impact on the average juror's life.
- concernedctzn 13y agoStill, it would be pretty inconvenient if newegg, amazon, other online stores wouldn't ship to your home address. Netflix, other services could block them based on billing address. Yes there are ways around this, and the real issue is patent law in the first place. Just a thought experiment.
- bdcravens 13y agoPretty sure Amazon is pro-patent (see "one click") You hit on a more important point: the real issue is the patent law. In East Texas there's a certain ideological slant, and it sucks for legitimate companies. But in the end, they're merely implementing the law. Pretty sure punishing a municipality because of verdicts in a federal court there would result in a fist in the mouth from the FTC. Marshall, Texas, or Boston, or San Francisco, or wherever, results in zero change - the real effort needs to take place in Washington DC.
- warmwaffles 13y agoWhich wont happen for a while. This kind of crap has been going on even when Henry Ford was trying to sell his Model T.
- peeters 13y agoHonest question from an ignoramus, would companies be able to avoid fighting patent battles in this district by refusing to do business there (thus preventing any claim of jurisdiction)? If so, what's the size of the market they would have to avoid?
- dmbass 13y agoThe United States of America. These cases are in federal courts.
- peeters 13y agoI understand they're in federal courts, but can every district court in the U.S. claim jurisdiction over any alleged claim/crime, regardless of where that claim/crime took place within the U.S.?
- mark212 13y agoHere's the technical answer: the federal courts have jurisdiction over (among other things) claims arising as a result of federal statutes, e.g., the patent laws. Suing in a particular US District Court is a matter of venue and venue is proper wherever the defendant does business. If New Egg ever sold an item or offered to sell an item anywhere in the Eastern District of Texas (and if you've got a website, then the answer is yes), then venue is proper in E.D. Tex.
- selectodude 13y agoSo, in theory, Newegg could blacklist the entire Eastern District of Texas from ordering things from Newegg, and nobody could sue them from there.
- desireco42 13y agoI think if more companies actually did that, maybe those IP cases would work differently. This is actually great idea.
- thearn4 13y agoAssuming that this is a conservatively minded region (correct me if I'm wrong), aren't frivolous lawsuits one of the things that they campaign against?
- mark212 13y agoTexas is conservative -- with a small c. Lots of suspicion towards outsiders generally, and towards large corporations in particular, have resulted in many outsized jury verdicts (in non-IP or patent cases) from Texas, as well as other red states like Mississippi, Alabama, Florida panhandle, etc. It certainly isn't the 17 story cash register that LA Superior Court, Downtown Civil Division is, but the smaller counties in Texas aren't bad at all from a plaintiffs' perspective. Just be sure the lead lawyer on the trial team is from around there and speaks with something of a twang.
- marquis 13y agoThis particular town was exposed as being well, corrupt, when it comes to patent suits. This American Life: they did a great job on this topic. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/441/transcript http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/441/t...