Usually a "vexatious litigant" is not one of these patent trolls, but some nut job who spends his days at the courthouse.
11,850 karma · joined June 1, 2021
"Better" would mean you don't get sued as much in the future, because you're a hard target and not easy money.
They haven't released this study, AFAIK.
A lot of patent trolls have no assets, and don't own anything except the patents they're currently milking. Then they go out of business, and there's nothing to sue. Sable apparently made the mistake of building up a portfolio and living on.
> Proving invalidity to a jury is hard. The burden on the defendant is high: Cloudflare needed to prove by clear and convincing evidence that claim 25 is invalid. And, proving it by describing how the claim is obvious in light of the prior art is complicated.
You're not kidding.
> Sable’s damages expert, Stephen Dell, told the jury that Sable was owed somewhere between $25 million and $94.2 million in damages.
"damages experts" == nice work if you can get it. The damage expert in the Apple v. Samsung trial that I went to was paid $2 million. "How much are you getting paid?" is always one of the first things they get asked on cross-examination.
> Sable has agreed to dedicate its entire patent portfolio to the public. This means that Sable will tell the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office that it gives up all of its legal rights to its patent portfolio
Left unsaid is whether this includes anything other than the patents that they already lost on.
Anyhow: great work, Cloudflare.
Always go to people's funerals, so they'll come to yours.
In the real world of universities, though, there's a clear distinction between professors, grad students, and Extension teachers. No matter what your dictionary says.
When it doesn't, the CD always works. Always. But one does get sick of that CD.
Bluetooth sucks.
Grad students' assistantships often require them to teach classes. It's not "a way to build favor with the professor," it's required for them to stay in grad school.
As for whether they're "random" or not: how would you know how they assign classes? I doubt it's by lottery.
Wrong. The teachers aren't professors of any type, or student assistants, or even employees. Their classes don't give credit towards a degree.
They're contractors.
> It's a problem precisely because the random teachers get affiliated with the school.
Wrong again. I haven't taught a class at UC Berkeley Extension, but if I had, I would not be entitled to say I was "affiliated with Berkeley."
I don't understand this. What does "the effort is not necessary to pursue anymore" mean?
> automatically assume it is worth the high price
Data needed: what do "regular" bootcamps cost and is Caltech's cost any higher?
The job market is different now, from what I hear.
If Caltech isn't monitoring the content of their courses and the student evals, then they're being negligent, for sure. But I don't see this as a systemic problem, other than maybe lack of disclosure.
And then your costs have to be less than that.
Correction: there is a new scoundrel every month. It would be nice to expose them all instantaneously, but unfortunately that's not possible.
But that one-dimensional view is boring. Life is more than politics.
The guy said, "That depends on whether you consider reputation 'nothing.' "
I guess what that shows is, you can always negotiate and compromise over money, but reputation is more of a binary. An academic can fake some work, and as long as he's never called on it, his reputation is set.
So yeah, a little more fear of having one's reputation ruined would go a long way towards fixing science.
A scapegoat is something that takes on all the sins of a lot of others who skate free. If Masliah is the only one who ever suffers, then he IS a scapegoat, but if this article serves to uncover a lot of other bad actors, then he's not. And if his example serves to warn a lot of other scientists to clean up their acts, then his suffering is a benefit.
You mean, by starting a big casino, hiring thousands of people, advertising all over, etc.? A small investment like that?
> The best you can do is move the needle a few percentage points across a statistically large number of humans.
That may be true, but a "few percentage points" is enough to create enormous profits, if you do what I said above. Giving the house a 54% advantage instead of 51% makes a big, big difference.
there are tons of books and TV shows about real-life espionage, including by people who went through the CIA's training course.
In fact, in evaluating the new microprocessors that were becoming available in the late 70's, "difficulty of implementing the Mesa virtual machine" was a big consideration. "Just reimplement the code generation part of the compiler" wasn't considered attractive.
Another supposed advantage of the Mesa virtual machine was: we can look at the code people are actually writing, and then reimplement the op codes to make the most common ones shorter and more efficient.
Anyhow, I had a conversation once with Catherine Lacavera, who at the time was head of Patent Litigation. I argued that damages awards should be based on what a willing buyer pays a willing seller in other cases, not on some "hypothetical negotiation. She didn't quite understand the issue, and said their damages formulas already did take that into account.
In reality, another VP of Engineering confirmed for me that he would never agree to a royalty-based license of anything, unless it had a cap on it. I don't know where they got this $20M figure, but "damages experts" get paid the big bucks.
Here's the form the jury returned:
https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/gkplgjkqyvb/...
Claim 5 reads:
the patent in question is https://patents.google.com/patent/US8738327B2/en?oq=us873832..., claim 5.
1. A system for controlling the operational status of an HVAC system comprising: at least one thermostat associated with a structure that receives temperature measurements from inside the structure, the structure conditioned by at least one HVAC system, the thermostat having at least a first setting stored therein; one or more servers located remotely from the structure, the one or more servers configured to receive measurements of outside temperatures from at least one source other than the HVAC system,
the one or more servers are further configured to communicate with the thermostat via a network, wherein the one or more servers receive inside temperatures from the thermostat and compares the inside temperatures of the structure and the outside temperatures over time to derive an estimation for the rate of change in inside temperature of the structure in response to outside temperature,
the one or more servers are further configured to receive a demand reduction request and determine whether the structure is associated with demand rejection request, and
based on the determination that the structure is associated with the demand reduction request, the one or more servers are further configured to send a signal to the thermostat to change the setting to a second setting to reduce electricity demand by the HVAC system.
5. The system as in claim 1 in which the estimation is a prediction about the future rate of change in temperature inside the structure.
If you scroll down, the jury awarded EcoBee $20,019,300.
"Is integrity of the prosecutor a valid answer?"
Yes it is.