The idea isn't just that a win there will discourage an appeal, but that the court will hear cases that most other courts would dismiss out of hand based on obvious prior art, vague claims, or USPTO investigation results. So the defendant is tied up in a court case, which includes an expensive jury trial. Worse still, the jury is so biased that they're all but guaranteed to loose the case. Most savvy defendents would choose to settle in that situation - which is all the patent-holder actually wants.
> somehow a mindset has developed there which is at odds with most other patent cases in the US.
Different courts form slightly different interpretations. There's a reason that the 2nd Circuit is the most liberal court. This court happens to be the most pro-plaintiff patent court you can find. It's not surprising the plaintiffs file there.
> This is a part of the country which has very little
Have you ever been there?
> so big corporations fighting patent cases bring a lot of money into the area and prestige to a court which otherwise would be in a backwater.
Do you think Apple fighting a court case floods money down the street like a river?
> the jury is so biased
Make whatever claims you want about the court, but if as you claim this area is a backwater with nothing going for it, how exactly is the local populace educated enough about the finer points of patent litigation to be biased?
This is a stupid decision but the mental gymnastics you're going through to try to make it fault of the area is impressive.
Yes. Lawyers have to eat, and they get paid enough to eat well. They need a place to stay, and they get paid enough to stay at a nice hotel. They need coffee, they need an airport, they need a rental car that needs gas. Your argument is that having people come to your city doesn't add to the local economy, but the fact that whole cities are built on tourism proves otherwise.
And that was a small company. Multiply that by 1000x and then add the defense payoffs from big corps...
The thing is that East Texas no longer has a monopoly on this - more jurisdictions are opening up to handling patent litigation (not sure what's driving that).
Samsung sponsored an ice skating rink in the town right in front of the courthouse. So, yeah, basically.
> But why do patent plaintiffs, especially trolls, see it as such a favorable forum? Partly, the district's relatively rapid litigation timetable can put pressure on defendants to settle. But other local practices in the Eastern District also favor patentees. And, in our view, they do so in a way that is inconsistent with the governing Federal Rules, and work to mask the consistent refusal by the courts in the Eastern District to end meritless cases before trial.
More trials should mean more money for lawyers in the area, judges, ancillary people like stenographers and clerks.
It's like a tourism business except instead of being a nice place that people want to go, you drag them there with $625M blackmail.
The people on these juries know that if they stop being a haven for patent trolls, the cash cow goes away.
If they changed something so caseload fell by 75%, do you think some judges might lose their job?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_judge#Te...
No Federal judge has ever been fired due to a reduction in the number of positions on the judge's court. (It's quite possible that a decreased caseload could result in fewer new judicial confirmations, but that affects would-be judges, not presently-serving judges.)
Courts in the US are given an extremely high degree of independence, in the goal of limiting corruption.
And exactly the opposite ended up happening in this case, isn't it? Corruption is a world-wide problem, but I don't know how widespread it is in developed countries. And its the same problem, people sitting at the top don't have authority to curb the ground-level corruption. Here in India at least, the government has started implementing something called Lokpal:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lokpal
It is an agency which works at the ground-level to curb the corruption both in the private and public sectors (and also the ministry). A question arose, however, that what happens if the Lokpal people itself went corrupt? And that's why the concept of decentralization was introduced. The central Indian agency, CBI can check the corruption in Lokpal, and of course, the courts have authority over both CBI and Lokpal. Thus, decentralization is at least, the present way of stopping corruption here.
The Supreme Court's job is to issue smackdowns on appeals courts, and they have been doing so rather consistently. EFF is lobbying the lower federal courts at the moment. See this story for details: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/eff-asks-appeals-...
But yeah, the President is actually quite weak. The President can't do shit about this problem.
In fact, Obama has done this, but not to such an extreme degree.
http://www.wired.com/2014/03/obama-legacy-patent-trolls/
Excerpt:
Obama issued five executive orders on patent reform last summer. Among other things, they require the Patent and Trademark Office to stop issuing overly broad patents, and to force patent applicants to provide more details on what invention they are claiming. One of the orders opens up patent applications for public scrutiny — crowdsourcing — while they are in the approval stage, to help examiners locate prior art and assist with analyzing patent claims.
Indeed, it's been a huge bonanza for the local residents as big corporations have rolled into town and spent millions on PR (often as close to the courthouse as they can get). Everyone in town is courted (forgive the pun) to try and see corporations in the best possible light, just in case they turn up on a jury in a case against $BIGCORP at a later date.
<humor>It's the American Way.</humor>
Great place for camping (45 minutes north-west near Gilmer, TX has an awesome OHV aka off-roading park). It's also got fairly mild weather (though doesn't freeze as often as I would've expected): http://www.usclimatedata.com/climate/gilmer/texas/united-sta...
Anyways, no pro-Marshall or anything. The idea of East Texas being a poor-ish "backwater" isn't far off the mark. But if you like nature and goofin' off, it's a real nice place to do it.