The Supreme Court's recent ruling inadvertently hurts patent trolls - Sensationalist Headlines

[quote]Tech companies and app developers everywhere are breathing a sigh of relief after Monday's major Supreme Court ruling on a topic that's close to their hearts: patents. More specifically, patent lawsuits — a rising number of which analysts say are bogus and threaten to strangle new start-ups and inventions before they have a chance to succeed. ... Until the Supreme Court's ruling this week, patent lawsuits could be heard all across the country, giving companies the opportunity to seek out courts where the odds were tilted in their favor. This led to a kind of clustering, where a handful of federal courts became responsible for deciding a huge number of patent cases. One major example is the Eastern District of Texas, which is notorious both for hearing a lot of patent infringement cases and also for handing accusers big wins. A 2015 study by PricewaterhouseCoopers found that the court was far more likely to decide in a patent plaintiff's favor than other courts. ... It's a big deal, particularly for smaller companies. [b]The court voted unanimously to say that patent lawsuits should be tried where the defending company is based, rather than in a court of the plaintiff's choosing.[/b] ... Tech companies worry a lot about being sued by firms that simply hold a lot of patents but don't use them to manufacture any goods. These are called “nonpracticing entities,” or “patent trolls,” because their main source of revenue comes from suing companies for infringement and hoping they settle, rather than using their patents to create things. If a patent troll can make the litigation so painful for a tech company that it would rather pay to get rid of the suit, then the troll has won. Of course, if the troll has picked a friendly court and the court hands the troll a victory, then it's also won.[/quote] [url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/05/23/the-supreme-court-just-undercut-patent-trolls-in-a-big-way/?utm_term=.5dea6381d46d]Washington Post[/url] The case itself has nothing to do with patent trolls, but their ruling has the side effect of hurting patent trolls bigly.

So the plaintiffs have to fight in the company's home court? Very interesting. I'm not sure how much the choice of field advantages copyright trolls, but anything that hurts that behavior is good by me.

[QUOTE=Vitisus;52267062]So the plaintiffs have to fight in the company's home court? Very interesting. I'm not sure how much the choice of field advantages copyright trolls, but anything that hurts that behavior is good by me.[/QUOTE] Means the defendant has to travel in addition to other expenses, makes them more likely yo settle instead of dealing with the bullshit

[QUOTE=Vitisus;52267062]So the plaintiffs have to fight in the company's home court? Very interesting. I'm not sure how much the choice of field advantages copyright trolls, but anything that hurts that behavior is good by me.[/QUOTE] As it says in the article, snippet even, if the case is heard in certain courts the verdicts are far more likely to fall in the plaintiff's favor. Patent trolls abuse that loophole to have their cases heard in these courts, thus getting a massive advantage they shouldn't have. And now the loophole's closed, so the patent trolls can fuck right off.

[QUOTE=Mort Stroodle;52267070]Means the defendant has to travel in addition to other expenses, makes them more likely yo settle instead of dealing with the bullshit[/QUOTE] I'm pretty surprised that they didn't have it in the defendant's home court.

This is actually kind of unsurprising from a civil procedure standpoint (I'm sure my old prof is excited). Patent law is one of the very few fields in which cases [i]must[/i] be filed in federal court (state courts cannot hear pure patent claims). Federal court jurisdiction is pretty restrictive, so usually you would need to sue in the company's home state - [i]except[/i] in the case of patent law, where you can sue any national company in any federal court with no restrictions on jurisdiction. Naturally this had the effect of patent trolls suing in patent-friendly courts. There's a lot of talk in jurisdictional arguments about preventing forum shopping, and here we are, encouraging exactly that for patents alone. So it's nice to have a concrete example of forum shopping in action on a mass scale, and it's good that SCOTUS overruled this ridiculously stupid precedent and reverted back to the standard jurisdictional rules.