story "The U.S. Supreme Court let stand a $4.3 million award against Toyota Motor Corp. for using another company's patented technology in gasoline-electric hybrid vehicles, including the top-selling Prius, Bloomberg News reported today. "Toyota also may have to pay Paice royalties for future vehicles it produces using the disputed technology. The appeals court told a trial judge to revisit his order that Toyota pay $25 for every Prius, Highlander and Lexus RX400h sold. The appellate panel refused to block sales of the infringing vehicles. "The disputed technology involves a microprocessor that accepts torque information from both the internal combustion engine and electric motor."
I just finished reading all 41 pages of the findings by the three district judges in Texas. Paice must have had it lawyers shop 'til they dropped to find a sympathetic court to present the original case. Both sides did their best to obfuscate and present what it wanted the jury to hear. I think Paice got more than what it deserved $5.00 per car for basically doing nothing. The case basically revolved around equivalents: Paice saying that Toyota's drive system was equal to what they had described in their patents but not the same. This is why most other countries do not follow our precedents in their courts because we reward people for doing nothing.
I agree, unfortunately since most hybrid cars are sold in the US, this will tend to penalize Toyota and reward Paice. After wading through the docs, I had a headache
Do a search on Google, you'll find that there is a district in Texas where patent trolls love to file for the following two reasons: 1) A judge that likes to "fast track" intellectual property cases, and who almost always sides with patent holder 2) A very large population of retired, poorly educated, elderly people who do not understand technology who end up on the jury Here's are a couple links to start: Techdirt: Why Patent Trolls Worldwide Love Marshall, Texas and Technology Review: A Haven for Patent Pirates If you work in high-tech you should probably already be familiar with what goes on there.
HTML: [quote="priusenvy, post: 614987"]Do a search on Google, you'll find that there is a district in Texas where patent trolls love to file for the following two reasons: 1) A judge that likes to "fast track" intellectual property cases, and who almost always sides with patent holder 2) A very large population of retired, poorly educated, elderly people who do not understand technology who end up on the jury Definitely sounds like Hillary country. Maybe she'll retire there.
i didnt read the decision, too tired...but actually having an idea and going through the patent prosecution process to actually be granted a patent does not sound like being rewarded for doing nothing...now whether Paice's patent is broad enough that toyota is infringing...you gotta look at the patent.
And yet the individual who actually holds ALL major patents on both gasoline and plug-in hybrids has asked for nothing - though EVERY hybrid on the road violates his patents. Patents that he has held, in some cases, since the 1970's.
If he has in fact had those patents since the 1970s, then they're all expired anyway (at least in the USA, which has a 17-year (maybe 20-year?) limit on the patent monopoly). Not that I'm defending patent trolls, but it's a fine line between rewarding inventors (both individual and corporate), yet keeping development free enough so that the state of the art can progress. (I work as a computer programmer, and software patents are an icky icky thing. 17-year lifespans might have made sense when it would take months if not years for an idea to make it from NYC to the west coast; now that it gets there in milliseconds with zero cost for copying, I'm not so sure...)
Only some are from that far back - most are far more current - and the big-selling hybrids (hmmm, what would that be???) didn't just start using the IP today, of course. The main reason that nothing has happened in this regard is because he does NOT wish to stifle what is currently happening. It is a tough thing. The stuff he developed didn't come for free, of course. It is basically his life's work.
The problem with the Paice's patent was that the application was amended just around the time Toyota came out with the Prius Gen I. Prior to that it was just a general set of statements about car that can run on dual power sources through a single transmission set up. No diagrams, no specifics. They amended it when the car was produced. So as far as I am concerned if I were on that jury, I would have flipped them a nickel for some nice thoughts, as they really did not invent anything but the vague possibility of a hybrid car. I guess the writers from Star Wars and Star Trek should patent their space ships just in case someone make anything similar.
First dumb question: Why can lawyers pick counties and courts to file? If I file a small claims, I have to do it in the jurisdiction of my address. Where does Paice have their corporate offices? They should be filing in the closest court to that address.
Yes, it is beyond broken when companies can sit on the sidelines and wait for others to produce something tangible, then extor^H^H^H^H^H extract money for having a similar idea. They don't have to attempt to do anything with the idea, they can just wait for someone else to do it. Originally, the purpose of the patent laws were to promote sharing of technology while providing some protection for the original inventor. Now the laws are perverted so that companies buy up patents and then wait to ambush other companies when a product is successful. And, if you are a individual inventor, you probably don't have the means to protect your valid patents anyway. So, the lawyers and the patent trolls are the only ones that benefit in the current system. The whole thing needs to be scrapped and redone.
It's even worse than that. Often, the company that's suing is not the company that filed the patent. There are companies whose sole business is buying up seemingly worthless patents from other companies who are liquidating their assets, and then go around suing as many companies as they can for infringing on the purchased patent, hoping that one in ten might settle. The result is a nice payday whenever the defendant decides it's cheaper to settle for a few hundred thousand dollars than to go to court.
