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Comment by MichaelBurge | Hacker News Reader

> ruling that patent infringement suits can be filed only in courts located in the jurisdiction where the targeted company is incorporated.

That should immediately put an end to the one district in Texas that has a cottage industry of patent lawyer tourism, right?

I suppose it opens up the reverse problem: Find a court that never upholds patents, incorporate in the local town, and infringe everyone's patents with relative safety. Somehow that seems like a better problem to have, though.

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Not quite the reverse. As another commenter noted, a large part of the problem is that that particular east Texas district didn't force plaintiff to pay defendants' costs when they (the plaintiff) lost. When you let the defendant choose the (presumably friendly) court, the cost of failed litigation shifts from the defendant to the plaintiff, who, unlike the defendant, has the option to appeal failed litigation. (But IANAL and I'm sure there are exceptions to this.)

And indeed SCOTUS has smacked both the CAFC and the Eastern District over patent fees in the past 10 years. More than once.

Do you mean plaintiff instead of prosecutor?

Yes, fixed, thanks.

You're still subject to being sued where you have a presence. So, not only do you have to incorporate in a friendly jurisdiction, you have to restrain yourself to operating out of such locations as well. At least based on my non-lawyer understanding.

It's a pretty high standard for operating. You have to have employees or a place of a business in the district. If you have one location and sell via delivery services, you are only vulnerable in that location.

Then you'd have to do your business in the district of Eastern Texas, which may well be punishment enough.

The major cities in the district aren't Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, El Paso, San Antonio, and Austin. They are Beaumont, Lufkin, Marshall, Sherman, Texarkana, and Tyler. There are four US districts in Texas, and pretty much anywhere you'd want to run a major business is in one of the other three.

I think it would more be that you have to find an entire state where the juries are decidedly opposed to patent trolls, since you could still get sued anywhere in any valid jurisdiction within the state, right?

> Find a court that never upholds patents, incorporate in the local town, and infringe everyone's patents with relative safety.

Yes, or -you know- incorporate in another country.

It seems to be a bad deal specifically for other countries companies which do businesses in the US. If you're incorporated in another country, I feel that patent Trolls can decide the state they want in the US to sue you about US law patent infringement on US territory. To protect itself a foreign company would need a local branch in the right state

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