The Good, Bad, and Ugly of Adam Carolla’s Settlement with Podcasting Troll
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If I understand correctly, Adam Carolla has been raising funds and support for his cause on the grounds that he’s fighting this on behalf of himself and others. If people wanted to donate to keep the podcast alive (perfectly reasonable), it would shave been cheaper to settle earlier or pay a licensing fee.
It feels a little off. OTOH, this is scary stuff. I probably would have done the same.
It is an unfortunate turn of events, but the battle is still being fought.
What if he had fought and won, but couldn't recover his expenses? I think he was estimating them to be in the range of $1.5M. Sure it would have helped everyone else, but that's a lot of money (and time) to risk when the other side is willing to walk away.
The huge oversupply of lawyers is coming from lower-tier law schools.
Is there a relationship/correlation between a lawyer's capability and the school they come from? I'm sure informally it's something people assume but I have no practical experience dealing with or knowing about the quality of lawyers' work.
The average salary for a lawyer in the UK is well below the national average salary. For the average UK lawyer, starting at the floor at McDonalds and working your way up is more profitable when factoring in the cost of law school.
But when you're facing a lawsuit, people tend to not look for "the cheapest that'll do", but "the best you can afford". If supply increases and prices drop, then that means you hire a better lawyer, not a cheaper one, and the worse ones end up doing simpler tasks.
Patents are one of the few areas of the law where it's cheaper to attack than defend. And at present they are the greatest threat to the most dynamic sectors of an otherwise sclerotic economy.
Any politician that is not actively pushing to reform the patent issuance and defense process is blasting the seed corn with a blowtorch. Burning the future.
A colleague was telling me a story of using an area firm to collect a debt, and complained about the billing. Their attorneys were >$200/hour, and they'd often do 'status update' phone calls with more than one attorney on the line. My colleague just grimaced on these calls doing mental accounting of ... "well, that was a $600 call.... there was an $800 call, etc".
If there were, say, 3 people doing some work at... $250/hr, $600k can still go pretty fast (definitely less than 6 months of part time work).
Do you not view keeping his show afloat as "something"?
*The justice system is broken.*
(Fixing the justice system would also fix two other problematic areas: the criminal justice system that relies on prosecutorial over-reach, and improved consumer protection.)
Other than tradition/inertia, are there reasons that trials are held in particular rooms and the ways they are? Could there be an electronic equivalent involving securely identified participants?
Could someone tackle this as a startup?
The way I'd move into this would be to get some experience with real trials and/or private arbitration. It would be ideal to get a JD and actually practice law, but that's probably not necessary. Arbitration is a good place to start because it's relatively unregulated and easy to introduce new models of interaction and judgement, and there's a strong cost minimization incentive anyway.
I'd work on it but I've got other fish to fry at the moment. Maybe next year!
What problem do you think this would solve?
It seems like you think that "mechanical work" is what is holding up motions, the conduct of the trial and enforcement.
But from what I can gather, what takes time is the human effort to make the arguments.
After all, a trial is just a program that outputs a single bit. (Yes, I'm aware that damages take more than a bit, but to a first-order the output is a bit.)
Sounds like the deal might formally extend to at least some other podcasters.
*edited for a tiny typo
Why do these articles make it seem like the patent trolls don't spend any money bringing these suits? I'm assuming they have just as many legal fees to take care of as Carolla does.
The only good side to this is these companies finally understand the ROI on cases like these are prohibitive to the company bringing them.
Despite Coralla settling, I'm pretty sure Personal Audio lost money in this mess.
A trial represents a huge risk for them - their patent could get invalidated, for example - so it will often make sense to settle even at a loss if an opponent will clearly put up a too risky, expensive fight compared to the potential return.
If this company generates 90% of their income from lawsuits and settlements, then they're a troll.
As great as i think it is to donate money to a legal defense fund for a wealthy celebrity, so that they don't have to use their own money to dodge dubious licensing fees, maybe that money could have gone further if it had been donated to a different cause? Instead a few wealthy patent lawyers just lined their pockets with donated money then fled the scene.