You know what? Perhaps you are right. By statute, patent damages are
... adequate to compensate for the infringement, but in no
event less than a reasonable royalty for the use made of the invention by the
infringer, together with interest and costs as fixed by the court.
When the
damages are not found by a jury, the court shall assess them. In either event
the court may increase the damages up to three times the amount found or
assessed.
On the other hand, copyright damages are, by
statute,
...a sum of not less than $750 or more than
$30,000 as the court considers just. For the purposes of this subsection,
all the parts of a compilation or derivative work constitute one work.
...In
a case where the copyright owner sustains the burden of proving, and the court
finds, that infringement was committed willfully, the court in its discretion
may increase the award of statutory damages to a sum of not more than
$150,000. In a case where the infringer sustains the burden of proving, and
the court finds, that such infringer was not aware and had no reason to believe
that his or her acts constituted an infringement of copyright, the court in its
discretion may reduce the award of statutory damages to a sum of not less than
$200.
If I am going after an individual, I'd choose a
copyright lawsuit rather than a patent lawsuit. Patent lawsuits are too
expensive and too complicated to justify going after most individuals, anyway,
and a patent only lasts 20 years.
Copyrights last much, much longer than
that, are cheap to bring, and you can make plenty of money suing infringers --
much more money from individuals than you can with a patent lawsuit. And
computers are copy machines that everyone has and uses. Better yet, I can get
your computer destroyed if I win:
As part
of a final judgment or decree, the court may order the destruction or other
reasonable disposition of all copies or phonorecords found to have been made or
used in violation of the copyright owner’s exclusive rights, and of all plates,
molds, matrices, masters, tapes, film negatives, or other articles by means of
which such copies or phonorecords may be reproduced.
Yep,
that's it. Why am I wasting my time being a patent attorney drafting patent
applications for greedy inventors? The rates per application haven't gone up in
about 15 years and are now, in many cases, so low that you can't make a decent
living wage anymore, considering the bar fees you have to pay, all the
continuing legal education you have to pay for, the fact that you have to have
both an engineering education AND a legal education and take out loans for both
if you want to be a patent lawyer, the fact that your malpractice insurance
rates are much higher than those of other attorneys, etc., etc., etc.
Worse, I won't take money from clients or potential clients just to get
another fee. Thus, I have to do a lot of unpaid work trying to separate
applications that both might make money and be patentable from all the junk
applications I get.
Instead, I can save all that effort and just sue you
and everyone else for copyright infringement and make a lot more
money. And you'll pay, because you are afraid of lawyers. It seems like a much
easier way to make a living, and I can finally stop trying to keep up with and
understand all this technical stuff.
Right?
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