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Comment by nibs | Hacker News Reader

Wow. I never knew this is how patent law worked. It seems like this might be a big 'patent integrity' bottleneck. Not that the Judge is not objective (I have no way of knowing), it just seems like there is too much room for opinion and influence to seep in when it is so centralized.

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As the article points out, ths centralization is a byproduct of Judge Ward, of necessity, having "built a better mousetrap" in terms of court rules for processing cases. As is customary in federal courts, when Judge Ward first became a judge, his initial case load was built by the court's other judges transferring the cases they didn't especially want to deal with; this included most of their patent cases. So Judge Ward found himself inundated with patent cases, and needed to figure out a way to keep up. Looking around for ideas, he adapted court rules that had been developed in the Northern District of California, which encompasses San Francisco and Silicon Valley. Those court rules, plus the low numbers of federal-crime cases in that rural division (by law, criminal cases get priority), meant that Judge Ward got his patent cases to trial quickly. This attracted plaintiffs wanting just such speedy "service."

This seems similar to the "traffic jams on new roads" phenomenon, by which adding more lanes or roads in an urban area actually increases traffic rather than alleviating it as highway-construction fans always expect. Providing public resources like courts or roads is never a neutral action, so political corruption is always a possibility.

From what I have seen in life, of how everybody including myself behaves, and how I think/feel, it is not just a possibility. The question is not is there any political corruption at all, the question is how much more than zero is it? When we fail to have checks and balances at all, or that actually try to work, then we're kinda doomed.

At first. But as the article points out, later on the east Texas district was no longer the fastest, but it still attracted a large number of plaintiffs, probably because its procedures and its decisions tended to favor plaintiffs.

Any time that one side gets to decide who runs the system and makes (and enforces) the rules, there are natural forces of evolution that will tend to favor that side. One might also say this is the same thing that is wrong with the binding arbitration system, where something like 95% of all decisions between consumers and a business are made in favor of the business (who selects the arbitrator).

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