"The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office conducted parallel reviews of the four patents and on Sept. 9 said none covered new inventions." [1]
So now it's up to the Federal Circuit to determine whether the Patent Office's ruling is right.
[1]: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-01/virnetx-wi...
If the Federal Circuit does find the patents invalid, the trial will have been for nought.
(You could argue that it would have been better to wait for the validity to be determined before proceeding with the trial, and indeed I think Apple did, but East Texas being East Texas the judge went ahead with the trial anyway)
What exactly is is reputation?
> Last year, there were just over 6,000 patent suits filed in federal courts around the country. One in four of those cases (24.54% to be exact) were filed in the Eastern District of Texas. 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.
It has a reputation for being so favorable to software patents that it's worth setting up an office in the district just so you can have that judge decide your cases.
2003: 14 cases
2004: 59 cases
2006: 236 cases
2013: 1386 cases (24.5% of federal patent cases)
2015: 2540 cases (43.6% of federal patent cases)
Whether or not the Eastern District (and specifically Judge Gilstrap) are actually more favorable to patent suit plaintiffs, this is straight up abuse of venue and that causes it's own issues. The cost to a defendant to litigate their case in Tyler, TX is an unnecessary burden.
It seems like there are problems in the patent office with issuing a lot of patents that shouldn't have been issued in the first place, but there is also a problem with there being several judges who collectively control billions of dollars worth of legal decisions.
So if you're going to legislate, it seems to me that patents should be easier to overturn and cases need to be spread more uniformly across jurisdictions.
Normally when a federal case gets appealed, it goes to the court of appeals for the part of the country where the case originated. But appeals in patent cases go exclusively to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC). This has led to the CAFC diverging significantly from traditional interpretation of patent law and to several strong rebukes from the Supreme Court, thanks in large part to the feedback loop of primarily seeing cases from people seeking highly expansive readings of patent law. Restoring diversity to patent cases -- by having appeals go to the geographic circuit courts instead of concentrating them all in a single specialized court -- would do a lot to roll back the overzealous expansions of patent law we've seen in recent decades.
How does that solve the problem? Wouldn't normal appeals courts see the exact same set of cases as the patent circuit currently does, under this proposal?
In reality, probably most cases would end up in the Fifth Circuit because that's the one that gets appeals from the Eastern District of Texas, but that's when you can step in and start pushing to avoid the venue-shopping problem that weighs down East Texas with patent cases.
[0] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/09/how-a-rogue-appea...
> cases need to be spread more uniformly across jurisdictions.
> Honestly, a more meaningful step would be to remove the Federal Circuit's exclusive jurisdiction over patent case appeals.
> Restoring diversity to patent cases -- by having appeals go to the geographic circuit courts instead of concentrating them all in a single specialized court
I think we agree on the principal that one court shouldn't have that much power (unless we're talking about the supreme court I suppose, but that serves a different purpose), how would a change like that even be implemented? Would laws have to be passed state by state or would federal law supersede that? Is there a better way to reduce the power of patent trolls? I haven't heard any, and I've followed the issue on and off for a good decade now without seeing much change.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_patent_law
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_District_Court_f...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Court_of_Appeals...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sG9UMMq2dz4 its like 5 min in.
Well, we could try passing a law like this:
"Any civil action for patent infringement may be brought in the judicial district where the defendant resides, or where the defendant has committed acts of infringement and has a regular and established place of business."
And we tried passing such a law. The text above is 28 U.S.C. §1400 (b) and has been the law of the United States since the 1897 patent statute. The Supreme Court says, "venue in patent infringement actions is solely and exclusively governed by § 1400(b), as a special and specific venue statute applicable to that species of litigation," (Fourco Glass Co. v. Transmirra Products Corp., 353 U.S. 222 (1957)) and has never reversed or amended that opinion.
But when you live under a corrupt and openly self-interested judiciary, you can't depend on the law to protect you. In 1982, after much lobbying from the patent bar, Congress directed all appeals of patent cases away from regional circuit courts of appeal, where almost all other appeals go, to the newly created Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC). The patent bar wanted a court filled with appointees from its own ranks to create new case law that would force engineers and companies to pay out much more fealty and cash to the patent lawyers themselves.
And we get an explosion in patents and patent litigation. Software patents were legalized by the CAFC and the CAFC abolished the venue statute in the VE Holding case of 1990, driving patent litigation to the entrepreneurial judges of the corrupt East Texas District.
Usually a court can't just decide to abolish a statute like that, but when an appeals court has exclusive national jurisdiction, there's no check on its power. The Supreme Court justices often comment on the power and freedom from ordinary limits of the CAFC and it is the most often reversed 9-0 of the appeals courts, but the Supreme Court can rarely make time to reverse all the CAFC's messes. The CAFC takes about 2-5,000 cases a year and the Supreme Court takes a couple hundred, just a handful of those from the CAFC.
The TC Heartland case is currently under appeal to the Supreme Court asking it to reverse the CAFC abolition of this statute. If the Supreme Court takes the case, East Texas will soon be limited to cattle and civil cash forfeiture cases.
It seems, IIRC, that invalidation after the trial doesn't change the outcome of that trial