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Comment by brittohalloran | Hacker News Reader

"I wasn't confused, but some of the jurors were". Does it seem crazy to anyone else to have non-experts making enormous rulings like this? This bumbling fool did some "calculations" to "zero in on 14%" ("I'm familiar with P&L statements") and decide that Samsung owes Apple a billion dollars!?!? I'm not saying that Samsung is innocent, but this seems like a ridiculous process.

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That's how our justice system works. I'm glad that any citizen gets to be on a jury rather than some elite set of experts. We can't have it both ways. If given the choice between "experts" and average citizens on a jury I'd go with average citizens every time. I don't care how dumb or smart they are. What I care about is if we decide that a certain kind of person should be on certain juries then that creates a new kind of class system and would hurt us more than help. The job of the lawyers throughout the trial was to explain these things to the jury and give them the information they need to make a decision. It's fine to have a jury full of people who have no clue about the patent system because the onus is on th lawyers in the trial to present the facts. If they fail to do so on either side then they have to deal with the consequences.

It's not fair but it's equal. America's judicial system is not about fairness so much as it is equality. Equality isn't always fair but in a country like this it's the best we can do.

Now what I'm about to say isn't an attack on you but instead just am observation. When people disagree with something they always try to explain why the bad thing happened. In this case it sounds like you're looking to explain away a decision you disagree with by saying the jurors should have been experts. If the jurors were experts and someone disagreed with the ruling then inevitably someone else would be sayng they should not be experts because of bias or some such reason.

So it looks like it's not good to have a jury decide and it's not good to have experts decide on the validity of a patents. Maybe it's that the idea of patents is flawed and the flaw manifests itself as a lack of a good way to determine if a patent is valid.

Honestly I do think that Samsung is guilty of copying Apple, so I'm not trying to explain it away. The fact that the jury determined the percentage is probably the part that peeved me the most. The numbers are so clearly based on anchoring (Samsung said 12%, Apple said 35%...) there's no way its accurate.

Honestly I do think that Samsung is guilty of copying Apple

You think? How? I mean what could have been another design? Like pulling a tail from the right bottom of the handset, or left? Or top? Or adding two horns on top? Or a big hole somewhere to distinguish.

Glad no one patented pants and shirts or undies. Or someone has done even that?

Some of the cartoonists who followed the trial and posted were more accurate in putting the farce of display.

It's not fair but it's equal. America's judicial system is not about fairness so much as it is equality

Experts cannot be enhanced by the uninformed, but the uninformed can be enhanced by experts. When you average proficiency and incompetence, you end up with incompetence.

>uninformed can be enhanced by experts

How is that different from expert testimony given to laymen?

Couldn't both sides have expert testimony that state opposing opinions on the same subject?

You could apply the same argument to any other kind of task. "If we decide that a certain kind of person should perform certain surgeries then that creates a new kind of class system and would hurt us more than help." So, if jury trials are a good thing, that's not for the reason you gave, since you obviously wouldn't want random people to perform heart surgeries or design bridges.

I don't know that the current system does much for equality either. For example, back when I used to read reddit there were a lot of stories about how black people are disproportionately likely to be convicted of crimes in the U.S. So if that's true, you can't help but wonder, maybe trained experts could be trained to be more color-blind than an average citizen.

Have you seen the movie "Twelve angry men"? It becomes much less uplifting once you realize that in the real life it will be just like that except there may be no Henry Fonda in the room.

You can't train someone to be impartial. There are problems with the juries and the court system but specially selecting juries isn't going to solve it. Jurors are supposd to be impartial and if this case had an expert jury they'd bring with them their own experiences with the patent system both positive and negative. So I'm a developer. Suppose I get called into jury duty and it's a case of some company suing a developer for checking an email account they set up for a client and the prosecution is arguing that the developer was in the wrong for doing so without permission. And let's say the reason for doing this was to verify that some transactional email accounts were working or to click an activation link for some peripheral service. Yeah, it's a way out there weird example but try not to get hung up on the details and stay with me on the bigger picture. As an expert juror I'm inclined to side with the defendant because I know how frustrating it is to work with clueless people and wait forever to get things done and I've created email addresses for people before and gone in there real quick for the exact same reason. Objectively what was done was wrong but in my mind it's justified. So I side with the defendant, persuade the other jurors and get the guy off the hook. The point is that experts are arguably more biased than anyone. A doctor being sued for malpractice with an all doctor jury will have lots of friends on the jury who will probably side with him having most likely feared or dealt with malpractice suits their whole career. That's why I like the idea of lay people getting the facts from expert testimony. You also can't train people to be color blind. If I told you not to notice someone's skin color it would just draw attention to it. Once something has been said or seen it cannot be unheard or unseen. America is a racist country, most jurors are white and middle class, and that's why you see more blacks being convicted than whites.

It's a messy issue with no perfect solution so non-experts are the best solution so far.

You can't train someone to be impartial.

Really? Why not? Do you have any citations to back this up?

if this case had an expert jury they'd bring with them their own experiences with the patent system both positive and negative

How come? In a case where it's important to know whether a patent was infringed upon or not (call it a technical thingie happened or not) it's very important that the very facts and formulas behind this were needed to be carefully understood by people who gave the verdict(I am not aware of the USA jury system other than explained by Hollywood).

Atleast they could have seen what a patent farce war it was. Now all they might have done was "Oh yeah.. looks like Samsung copied Apple.."..another "..yeah..seems like that..hmm you are right".. "a billion dollar will be fine..no?".. "yeah...that's perfect.. let them pay a billion dollar".. or whatever happens inside there.

I'm glad that any citizen gets to be on a jury rather than some elite set of experts

Expert testimony is used in trial all the time and is given great weight by jurors. Experts parse out highly technical details and draw conclusions to help the jury. Now, I'm not disagreeing with your initial assertion, but am pointing out that our justice system depends mightily on technical and professional elites.

The problem with this case is that a set of very complex and technical questions (did one or more patent infringements occur?) are being decided by non-experts. Having a lay jury decide these questions is as absurd as having the jury determine the caliber of gun used in a murder. Technical questions require expert/elite knowledge to untangle.

I comppletely agree but my point was that since we can't have it both ways, a jury comprised of average citizens is preferable to a jury of elites no matter the profession or industry. I'm sure an expert jury would have made a far better decision but I'm in favor of the lesser of the two evils.

in favor of the lesser of the two evils

It can be (and is) extremely dangerous at times. Leave the billion dollar aside for some time. It can kill an innocent and set a culprit free, if that's the valid rationale of yours.

I suspect expert testimony in jury trials will be less effective in American jury trials as anti-intellectualism continues its rise there. In Japan with lay judges now we see the opposite problem as the lay judges mostly just decide the case in whatever way the expert judge prefers.

"It's fine to have a jury full of people who have no clue about the patent system because the onus is on th lawyers in the trial to present the facts. If they fail to do so on either side then they have to deal with the consequences."

Except that once one lawyer screws up, the legal precedent is set, and the rest of the people down the line get screwed too.

I would prefer set of experts - I don't see how lay person could be deciding in places where even experts can have problems.

They make life and death decisions in criminal cases. Why not make decisions for a few percent of companies turnover?

Given the numbers of phones Samsung is selling the per device fine isn't that high. Compared to copyright infringement statutory damages in files sharing cases the amounts are tiny.

Edit to add:

Some fair points were made in replies about the complexity of the patent law compared with criminal/murder cases but the parent to this was commenting the scale of the damages decided rather than complexity and that was the focus of my comment.

Yes it is scary but I'm not sure I can think of less scary options for really serious criminal cases.

"They make life and death decisions in criminal cases. Why not make decisions for a few percent of companies turnover?"

I don't know if you intended that to be comforting, but I really can't see it that way.

And that is even if I ignore my suspicion (hope?) that the average juror will tread with more care if they are considering the life of another person, than if they are considering a corporation's money.

You're joking right? Oftentimes the fact that lives are involved makes jurors even more irrational. The life of the victim usually takes precedence over the life of the accused.

http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/innocence-and-death-penalty#...

I wasn't joking, but now I am depressed.

Not meant to be comforting but to put things in perspective.

The difference there is the evidence is usually quite easy to understand. You don't need to know how DNA is matched to know that there is a DNA match. You also don't need to understand entropy to grasp that if glass is shattered inside the house, then the window was broken from the outside.

However you /DO/ need to understand prior art to rule in a patent dispute. There's no escaping that.

Technically minded people like us often bitch about how the mass media publish misleading "facts" (and often complete fallacies) due to their lack of technical understanding. Yet here we have a jury ignorantly making billion dollar decisions.

It's a bit like asking a group of hair dressers to officially confirm or deny whether CERN's "faster than light" neutrinos were a calculation error or not.

True, the stakes in a death sentence case are higher, but the reasoning and expertise required are a lot lower. "Does the evidence prove beyond a reasonable doubt that this person killed that person" takes significantly less intelligence and expertise than "According the volumes of patent law and complex edge cases and prior art, does it seem like they were copying Apple" and "Examine this financial data and tell me how many dollars Apple lost because Samsung copied them".

Have you ever been on a jury for criminal case? It's not like Law and Order where the evidence is that clear cut.

Having been on a federal jury for a gun running charge, I can't even begin to describe how difficult that moment is when the future of someone's life is in your hands. I think the maximum penalty was only 7 years, but even that is enough for you to question every shread of evidence both sides presented.

The difference is that in a criminal trial, if the evidence is not that clear cut then the decision is easy: acquit. Criminal trials require proof beyond a reasonable doubt, and a unanimous verdict. Civil suits only require a 'preponderance of evidence' and only a bare majority of the jury. It's far more wishy-washy, and in a patent suit like this one the issues are far more complicated.

The stakes are significantly higher in this case than a death sentence. Statistically, human lives are in the US are valued at about 8 million dollars.

Fun fact: Tell people DNA evidence is 99.9% accurate and labs and other facilities make mistakes 10% of the time, ordinary people think that the probability of DNA evidence in court is valid is something like the average of the individual probabilities.

>Why not make decisions for a few percent of companies turnover?

The problem is that this case wasn't really about Samsung, and it wasn't really about a few companies, or the fine. This was a high profile case about a broken IP system, a rogue gorilla and an outcome that stifles innovation in the technical arena (not just smartphones). You don't think someone will think twice before even going near Apple again, regardless of the validity (or prior art) of the patent? I am incredulous that anyone could have come to the conclusion of this juror, particularly someone with a tech background.

Hopefully, this won't be the last battle that could turn this madness around.

The IP system is pretty broken in a number of ways but this case is not the example to pick. Samsung clearly copied to a certain extent even if the patented items were arrived at independently the overall copying created a perception that they copied.

And Googorola and Samsung are the real rogues with their FRAND abuse.

Part of where this juries judgement seems to have come from is the sense that Samsung was copying more than they felt appropriate. I know that this might not be quite legally the correct approach but maybe it is the strength of using a jury that they can balance a total judgement rather than just summing individual damages.

The file sharing copyright judgements may be more sensible if a jury decided the damages.

Unfortunately part of the Jury selection process is lawyers filling it up with the least informed, most gullible people they can find.

If that's true statement, then there should be evidence, right? I don't have a citation, but I do know that there have been several studies of jury effectiveness. A cursory look at a few of them seems to indicate that they are effective.

That's just as much Samsung's fault as it is Apples. They could have dismissed this guy or any other juror, possibly without giving an explanation, or they could have argued that he wouldn't be impartial.

It bothers me that we seem to be attacking the jurors as if they were appointed in this case via back-door-meetings between the government and apple. Didn't Samsung get the opportunity to interview the candidates? Were they allowed to remove potential jurors from the pool? If this was the jury they all agreed on then the people to be angry at is Samsung's pool of lawyers, not the jurors they selected (or rather, jurors they didn't dismiss).

Yeah, I'm being too cynical.

> Were they allowed to remove potential jurors from the pool?

Of course, but each side has a limited number of times to veto a jury member. Those run out pretty quickly.

Smart people are usually the ones who get out of jury duty.

It's also worth noting that while there is a right to a jury in a patent trial, it's not required. If both sides had agreed, the case could have been heard by the judge or a court-appointed special master. Obviously, one side or the other (maybe both) thought that a jury trial would work in their favor.

>I'm not saying that Samsung is innocent

You've got to get past this mindset. Was there prior art? Did Apple really invent this? Were the patents specific, non-obvious, etc.

No, No, ...

When you add that the outcome stifles innovation and a you add a broken IP system, you have so many nails in the coffin, it isn't funny.

Case closed.

It was interesting hearing Nilay Patel (the verge) talk about this. He's very pro-patent, so he has a particular point of view, but his take is "yes the jury was incompetent but that's exactly how it's supposed to be". The underlying point being, both sides have the chance to educate the jury during the course of the trial. They have weeks to show them evidence, help them understand the laws and patent process, etc. If at the end of that time the jury is still incompetent to make a decision then it is the fault of parties in litigation. It seems to me this is as much Samsung's mistake as anything; they allowed in a jury member who was both incompetent, pro-patent and highly assertive and persuasive, and then they failed to anticipate and counter his influence effectively during the trial. If they were paying attention to these things they might have got a much better outcome.

so you can see why choice of venue is so important. if this were tried outside of "the valley" you would not get people like this on the jury.

your comment about anchoring is spot on.

>Does it seem crazy to anyone else to have non-experts making enormous rulings like this?

No, it seems democratic. The law is about the will of the people --which is what the "jury of your peers" tries to capture--, not about what some experts say.

Experts can serve the court with their "expert advice" (which lots of times in such cases is just BS, depending on which side pays their bills).

It's dead easy as a lawyer to find experts with Phd's and all, to testify both pro and against patents, or both pro and against each company in this dispute).

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