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| Authored by: jkrise on Thursday, January 03 2013 @ 08:47 PM EST |
None of them can really be a significant contributor to the buyer's desire
for the product, but only in aggregate. This would lead to a significantly lower
per-patent royalty.
Precisely, and the point would be made clear
to all citizens, competing corporates, as well as the USPTO and the courts. The
patents were issued one by one, after due process, which means that the issuing
office felt that they were worthy of being issued. They were not issued in
aggregate. The purpose of granting a patent is for conferring a limited-time
monopoly on the inventor to moentize his valuable invention by taking it to
market.
So this means the USPTO felt that there are hundreds of
mutually differentiated, innovative, non-obvious methods of touching a
smartphone with more than one finger; all of them by one company. There could be
many more companies who have been issued multi-touch patents.
It
appears the jury in this case has awarded damages not by the number of patents
infringed, but by some other unknown math. Florian estimates each patent to be
worth about $2 to $4. By his logic, a single phone incorporating 100s of
touch patents alone should be worth more than $1,000. Add thousands of other
patents, and it should be $ 1 million per phone. But Apple is selling a
phone which DEFINITELY infringes ALL their own thousands of patents for say,
$500.
So, the penalty for infringing 1 patent should be fixed at
Value of product which infringes all patents Divided by Number of patents
infringed, about $ 0.0001 per patent. This amount can be more precisely
calculated thus, than the arbitrary algorithm suggested by Florian. And it would
make everybody feel that Justice WAS done, because it presumes the inventors,
the USPTO and the courts all did a very fair job.
Such an approach
would SOLVE the problem of corporates acquiring thousands of patents,
threatening infringers, etc. The present system discourages innovation, and
favours status quo by the big businesses, which is not good for innovation. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: jkrise on Thursday, January 03 2013 @ 09:29 PM EST |
What the courts try to do for economy of everyone's time, is to make the
plaintiff pick what they believe are the most valuable patents to try.
My point is that, by setting limits on arguments, number of patents etc.,
the precise opposite effect has been achieved. Everyone's time has been
wasted.
The plaintiff has invested TIME, effort and expense in being
awarded his thousands of valuable patents. Why should that TIME go
waste?
The USPTO spent several man-hours evaluating and issuing the
valuable patents. Why should that TIME go waste?
The defendant has
spent TIME, 2 years in this case, to get 2 of the 6 patents-in-suit re-examined,
and preliminarily declared invalid on all counts by the USPTO. Why should that
TIME go waste?
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I come to valuable. By definition,
every single patent is valuable. If a patentee has been granted a patent which
he himself feels is not valuable, the punishment for such offence is already
covered in my previous post - put the numerosity of patents goes to the
denominator in damages calculation.
An additional penalty should be
levied for each patent in suit that has been invalidated on re-examination. The
amount of this penalty should be magnitudes higher than the amount sought for by
the plaintiff. For instance, if a plaintiff seeks $1 bn in damages for
infringing 3 patents from 1 defendant, and assuming the defendant gets all 3
invalidated on re-examination; the plaintiff should be fined say, $10 bn;
for applying for frivolous patents, threatening many competitors, decelerating
innovation in the marketplace, wasting everyone's time and resources etc.
At present, I believe most re-examination requests are from Anonymous
sources. Given that in this case, ALL 20 claims in the patent application have
been invalidated, the prize money for the successful re-examination should go
the requesting party.
Such an approach would discourage big
businesses from applying for, and getting 1000s of patents, and the farce of the
3 most valuable among them being found completely invalid. It would permanently
SOLVE the vexatious problem, and save everyone's time in the long run.
SOLVING a problem is more efficient than repeatedly DEALING with it.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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