|
|
|
| Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, August 26 2012 @ 12:47 PM EDT |
This doesn't matter. The question isn't whether the juror in question was a
professional (engineer or attorney), but whether they had a conflict of
interest. Since the juror owned a patent (and a highly questionable one at
that), he was quite clearly in a biased position.
Better Question: Why was this juror not removed in voir dire? Is there no such
procedure in this type of case?
More to the overall issue of patents, we have a juror who believes in the
integrity of a patent system that granted him a patent on the basis of filing
for a "device" that downloads content to internal storage and makes it
available via removable storage. The obviousness of his own personal patent
(obvious to anyone that's ever used a floppy disk to remove content after
downloading) and it's invalidity taught him that this is what the patent system
is all about.
If this isn't the best example of the useless patent system infecting the very
deciders of patent validity, I don't what would be.
I'm a software engineer with 31 years of experience and have discussed these
issue with one of my best friends who is a patent attorney. In all that time,
having developed everything from operating sytems, OS drivers, communications
software, business software, CAD systems, computer games and more I've only seen
one unique "device" that I thought even approached the novelty
required and that was fractal compression. Ironically that is an algorithm and
is not supposed to be patentable in the US, but it was -- so I suppose they
turned it into a device.
eris
[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
|
| |
| Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, August 26 2012 @ 08:59 PM EDT |
because the juror failed to mention that there are in fact 300 million people in
this country, so a "1 in 20 million" accident should happen about 30
times. In other words, he misled the rest of the jury by giving incomplete
evidence which the defense was not given the change to controvert.
I wonder if jurors are technically allowed to be qualified as expert witnesses
and cross-examined. An interesting idea...
Personally, I am *absolutely sure* that the jury should be allowed to ask
questions of the witnesses, the way the judge does. I think this accounts for a
good half of the bizarre behavior in the jury room; the prosecution and defense
fail to respond to the questions of the jury, because the jury isn't allowed to
ask them.
So the jury has to make up its mind on those questions, which may be the key
questions in the jury's opinion, with no assistance from anyone.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
|
|
|
|
|
