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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, September 28 2012 @ 05:47 AM EDT |
Juries are non experts, and are specifically not trained to
analyse patents.
It seems to boil down to a gut feeling and an ability to
persuade others of that gut feeling. Anyone can have a gut
feeling, and certain (not always honest) people are good at
persuading others, but seems to be a profoundly bad way to
decide facts which has unfortunately been accepted as best
practice, since it doesn't implicitly provide an advantage
to either side. Arguably it's equally terrible for all
parties.
It seems that being uninformed on a subject is actually
highly prized (and when you see the damage a little
knowledge can cause, it's easy to see why...)
If I were on a jury on a case like this, I would have strong
opinions on the technology and the code involved, and
whether it appeared to match the claims on a patent, but no
better idea than anyone else about the legal aspects of the
patenting process, which bits (if any) of the patent are
valid or invalid, and all that gumph, mainly because patents
are clearly not intended to communicate between experts in
the field, but instead lawyers.
If I (in a jury room) were to state in clear terms the facts
about the code as provided (ie. "code X implements Y. It
does it in Z way. As a lay opinion, the patent claims appear
to reflect a method P, hence I do not believe this is an
infringement", or "The patent method seems to reflect M,
which would be pre-dated by prior art L" ), would I be
providing illegal expert witness testimony, or just using
common sense and my own relevant experience? It seems
difficult to set aside stuff that I know to be true purely
because it hasn't been explicitly placed into evidence
(presumably because the sides disagree on it and the judge
hasn't ruled).
It seems to me that juries should not hear cases like
these., and patents should not be written like this. The
whole thing is a farce that the big companies are too
invested in to get rid of.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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