"The Supreme Court issued 6 patent helpful patent decisions while our case was pending. In particular, Alice v. CLS Bank invalidated patents on taking mundane tasks and doing them on a computer. The patent in our case was basically for sending notification calls from a computer. Probably invalid under Alice. A second Supreme Court case, Octane v. Icon encouraged judges to impose “fee shifting” penalties in appropriate patent cases."
...
"After reading it, and weighing the recent Supreme Court decisions, the troll simply dropped its case against CarShield. After months of dedicated work, the clinic students deserved a gavel-banging judicial decision in their favor. All they got was a quiet withdrawal. But I think we can still chalk it up in the win column. The case is dismissed (for now), the students learned real patent litigation skills."
Does the decision encouraging "fee shifting" require that the case go to trial? Does it require that the fees actually be paid by the defendant? Or might the law school students still be able to receive payment by the troll for their pro bono defense? It seems like the "new standard" would be much more effective if it also applied in cases like this.
>> Does the decision encouraging "fee shifting" require that the case go to trial?
Nope. It only requires that the case is "exceptional" -- in the sense that the plaintiff filed an exceptionally crappy lawsuit.
>> Does it require that the fees actually be paid by the defendant? Or might the law school students still be able to receive payment by the troll for their pro bono defense?
I haven't looked into this myself, but my law students tell me that we can get fee shifting even for pro bono work.
I note that it was dismissed without prejudice (i.e. the troll can refile). This is somewhat disappointing, but I believe they only get to withdraw a lawsuit voluntarily once and I don't really expect them to come back and sue this particular defendant again (i.e. they'll probably go after softer targets).
One thing I wonder is if patent defendants in a situation like this might win from publishing all of their legal research on the patent online? It seems like this might help future defendants if there was anything interesting and I believe a tactic like that was used with some success against Microsoft in some of the state antitrust lawsuits long ago.
This is why we started using law school clinics to do free legal defense. It’s a win-win arrangement: students cut their teeth on real litigation, startups get free legal defense, and patent trolls get nothing.
The reason why it's so expensive for startups to even consider defending themselves is because attorney fees are supra-competitive and corporations cannot represent themselves in court pro se according to Local Rules, such as Civil Local Rule 3-9(b) in the Northern District of California. Whether through (absurd) precedent or rules codifying that precedent, it's been that way for 200 years.
However, it shouldn't be that way anymore--not after Citizens United. I'm fighting a lawsuit about this issue right now, and if I win (however unlikely), corporations will be able to represent themselves against patent trolls.
Is it difficult, confusing and complex work? Yes. Is it any harder than programming, or anything else a serious startup would do? Not really. And it beats paying a law firm six or seven figures.
I love this story and it's a great effort by this law school. I wonder if there could be some crowdsourced efforts to pool together key documents, resources, processes, etc so that defending against a patent troll could be more efficient. This would lower costs of defense and further discourage patent trolls.
We definitely want to put together some guidelines for other schools to run similar projects. In fact, @jorgemtorres wrote an entire Kauffman Fellows thesis on this topic.
> The patent behind all these lawsuits is not particularly innovative. It claims something about sending notifications after an emergency phone call. Here’s the gist from one of the figures . . . .
This is a little disingenuous. You know the patent doesn't cover the "gist" or any particular figure. It covers the claims (which you don't mention at all, even in passing). And for some reason, you don't even tell us what the patent number is so we can look at it for ourselves!
From a little googling, I suspect that we're talking about Pat. No. 6,775,356. But why hide the ball and characterize the patent as "not particularly innovative" when you could just let people see it for themselves?
> You know the patent doesn't cover the "gist" or any particular figure. It covers the claims
It seems like whenever anyone criticizes a patent by summarizing it, someone points out that the patent is defined by the claims, but if anyone criticizes a patent by reading the claims, someone points out that the claims have to be read in the context of the rest of the patent.
Primary sources are always useful, but so is some context from the writer. Reading the patent and the recent SCOTUS opinion, Alice v Cls Bank, it definitely looks to be invalid in the context of software implementation. I wouldn't call the writer "disingenuous." It would be difficult to argue for fee shifting as an exceptional case, because there has been only a few recent decisions and not consistent precedent yet.
I love how Medium becomes my favourite "time waster". I remember about buzz in media about how pointless Medium was but since some time majority of articles I found on major suggesting websites from Medium are extremely interesting.
When reading articles from Medium I feel like I am not only not wasting time but acquiring knowledge in extremely fast pace.
I love this. But, am saddened that the troll hasn't lost. The troll is free to move on to the next mark, which likely won't have a free legal team behind them.
I wonder if invalidating patents, that trolls commonly use, a good use of a law student's time?
What would be really awesome is if the BLIP clinic students decided to dedicate themselves to destroying this particular troll. Since they'd already put in the hours getting up to speed on the patent in question (and filing that likely-would-have-been-successful motion), they should reach out to the other folks who have/will be sued by 911 and offer to defend them. Troll the troll, as it were.
Honestly, 911 Notify is far from the worst troll. Most of their targets are deep-pocket public companies that have plenty of cash to hire big brand law firms.
I think it would be a great use of student time to identify the most egregious patents / trolls and try to invalidate their patents.
I would imagine in most cases you can't invalidate a patent without going to trial. I could be wrong on this.
From what I've read, it seems if a patent troll feels they might lose the case they'll drop it. Why risk losing the patent when you can just move on to the next mark?
Careful: It's hard to craft remedies against patent trolls that don't also penalize poor inventors whose work was really and truly ripped off by a much richer entity. Even simple rules like "loser pays" can make the potential downside of filing a valid suit so intimidating that large players get a complete pass.
How come there isn't yet??? Out of all the stuff that makes my blood boil the most... this is it. So basically the troll gets off for free and just does it again? What in the actual fuck.......
I'm surprised there isn't an EFF-like non-profit that provides pro-bono patent defense to start-ups, against patent trolls. I would donate to that organization.
I've seen a lot of horseshit patents asserted against start-ups. If there was an organization that followed the troll around and offered defense services against all of their defendants, it would make trolling a lot harder, and might reduce the numbers of these parasitic lawyers involved in this shameless trade.
I just read about a Fish & Richardson patent partner who started filing his own "inventions" with the patent office, based on slight modifications of the patents he was filing for clients, and then sold those patents to trolls for huge sums. Its actually really easy to write patents focused on sabotaging your clients, if you are a lawyer and become familiar with their future roadmaps.
I know a bunch of trivial claims I could write right now and they would be worth a few million in a couple years, because Google, Facebook, and others would have to move in that direction in a few years (related to Machine Learning and image recognition).
All you have to do is follow conferences, understand the papers, and then write some trivial, and obvious evolutions of those techniques. Obviousness is something defendant's find extremely difficult to prove for highly complex technology, because the juries are made of people that have no idea what programming is, much less Machine Learning, and the judge is probably some moron, that thinks he is really smart, and assumes that he patent office is full of diligent geniuses ... and so he will give a lot of weight to the plaintiff's "USPTO certified" claims.
All it takes is for a programmer to be involved in one patent litigation and you see the patent system for what it is. A colossal system of giant, continuous, expensive injustice implemented in the hope of preventing an extremely rare form of injustice (when a true original inventor is cheated by a shameless larger company).
Imagine we institute an expensive system of highly trained commandos to follow every nerd in America around in high schools across the country, to protect them from bullying and to be their friends. It would certainly stop all physical bullying. But would it be worth the giant overhead/expense?
That is what we have to start asking ourselves. Even if the patent system prevents some rare injustices, WTF, is this continuous, and overwhelming cloud of uncertainty for every start-up and company worth it?
I feel like China and India are doing quite alright without overburdensome strong patent protection. And Europe seems fine with a hamstrung software patent system. And even in the US, Microsoft, Oracle, Adobe, IBM, and Apple got their start before software became patentable ... and they all did, and are doing fine.
If you see someone arguing for patents, they are almost always some fucking lawyer, troll, or someone sitting on a giant portfolio. The people actually making software every day don't want this shit system. VCs that fund start-ups, don't want it ... even though you would expect they want it, to protect their investments.
> I'm surprised there isn't an EFF-like non-profit that provides pro-bono patent defense to start-ups, against patent trolls
Such an organization might be eligible for tax-exempt non-profit status as a trade group, but it doesn't seem likely that a firm dedicated to providing services to a particular class of for-profit business would qualify as a 501c3 with tax-deductible donations.
>> I'm surprised there isn't an EFF-like non-profit that provides pro-bono patent defense to start-ups, against patent trolls.
Part of the problem is making it scale. It takes a lot of man-hours to defend a patent litigation case. Its certainly possible to set up such a non-profit... its just difficult. We're working on it!
>I'm surprised there isn't an EFF-like non-profit that provides pro-bono patent defense to start-ups, against patent trolls. I would donate to that organization.
First, I am not sure if the EFF defends such suits, but I believe they challenge the validity of patents held by various patent trolls.
Secondly, 481 days ago I proposed the idea of a crowdfunding website for the purpose of posting demand letters from trolls, allowing donations to challange specific patents if goals were meet Did not receive much interest from HN at the time. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5573778
> I'm surprised there isn't an EFF-like non-profit that provides pro-bono patent defense to start-ups, against patent trolls. I would donate to that organization.
I'm sympathetic to the plight of startups having to deal with the trolliest of trolls, but give me a break. There are so many worthier avenues for pro-bono legal work than helping out for-profit companies.
Firstly, your implication that patents are only supposed to protect the weak from the strong is incorrect. That is a common ex post-facto rationalization of patents, but not the only one. Simply preventing copying by a competitor, regardless of size, is perfectly fine.
"... public and large private companies initiated 42% of all lawsuits studied, 28% of the time against other large companies... 4% of the suits were initiated by individual inventors (David v. Goliath), 18% of the suits were brought by small private companies against public or large private ones (small v. large), 16% pit one small- or medium-sized company against another (limited stakes), and in 8% a large firm sued a small one (predation profile)."
So at least 22% of lawsuits involve a "small guy vs big guy" scenario. But considering that trolls (who, surprisingly, file a relative minority of suits, the study finds) often buy patents from individual inventors / small companies who cannot litigate themselves, that number may likely be higher. Now this says nothing about the merits of the lawsuits, but there certainly are a lot of small firms taking on bigger firms.
Now setting aside your strawman that the intended use is only small vs big, at least two-thirds of the time patents are used by operating firms against a comparably sized or larger firm. That indicates that the majority of the time the system is not being abused, even if you make the questionable assumption that all big vs small and troll suits are completely meritless.
> I feel like China and India are doing quite alright without overburdensome strong patent protection.
Really? I don't see many notable technical innovations come out of those countries, and I say this as a citizen of one of them. They are very good at reproducing technology, no doubt, but invention is rare.
> And Europe seems fine with a hamstrung software patent system.
If there's one thing the smartphone wars showed us, it's that other countries have software patents of similar quality as the US. The litigation environment is very different, though.
Also, citation on the Fish & Richardson lawyer? IANAL, but that sounds like shenanigans that could lead to disbarment.
It was dismissed without prejudice. This means nothing. If a patent troll wanted to do the same thing & file for the same lawsuit, they could easily do so. This isn't a "win" for the sutdents as much as it's "oh, let's just drop it."
I'm glad they didn't have to the pay the troll, but I also hate when the troll doesn't get what it deserves, either: losing.
I think it means something, but I agree with you I wish the patent troll wasn't getting away with it.
This seems similar to a house that had an alarm system. The thief opened the door and started to look for good stuff to take then heard the alarm go off and ran away. Mainly I would say the home owner "won" in that case by not having their stuff taken. Though it is annoying that the thief could come back and they have to deal with the thief's break in attempt. And it is annoying the thief wasn't caught and put in jail to prevent them from just going to the next house and breaking in there.
Is there a legal procedure that would have made it possible for the defense team to say to the judge "It should not be possible to dismiss this unless it is with prejudice"?
Isn't there a potential startup in here? The judicial process follows clear and distinct steps, with clear and distinct documents for every step. It seems like much of this can be automated as much as the trolls automate their process?
Question 1: has the lawsuit been filed in an odd/irrelevant place? Followed by some subquestions to be more precise. If so, fill out this form, include the addresses of .. and ... and we'll send a form letter to them for you, asking for a dismissal.
Question 2-5: keep stalling and asking for dismissals based on various reasons.
Question 6-10: try some other ways to get the troll to drop it, for instance by presenting an example of obvious prior art
Of course all letter include repeating references to relevant higher court decisions.
I wonder if this model can work with the criminal justice system as well. Quite often, defendants feel it is better to accept a plea deal even when they have done nothing wrong because the economics of fighting a lawsuit (as well as the outcome in case of a botched up defense) makes it compelling to accept the accept the plea deal. The mechanism is analogous to the patent troll scenario. If law school students can take up these "troll equivalent" cases, they gain valuable experience and defendants get a fair shot.
This article reads like one from 2600. You should consider publishing it on that magazine. I'm not sure about the process, but it might be really neat to do so.
I wouldn't be surprised if there was a lawschool that had students supporting patent trolls. There are some schools out there that are founded on ideological grounds.
This article suggests that this is a win-win situation for the startups and law students, but, it's a pretty one-sided deal here. This doesn't work out at all in the long term without unfair exploitation of the unpaid labor of the students.
While helping out gives the students experience, it's not reasonable to consider this any sort of real option beyond an occasional situation in which a startup can solicit a law-student who takes on a single case as part of their curriculum.
It's not "unfair exploitation". The students willingly sign on to get meaningful experience working on real cases. It gives them a chance to do real work and see more closely how actual law work is done.
From the sounds of the article, there is one small clinic in Brooklyn that makes this a "real option" for companies. It's not like every company that faces patent trolls can rely on it, but I don't think it would be far-fetched to think that other law clinics may begin to (or already do) offer similar services.
True. This doesn't solve the patent troll problem. We could replicate the clinic at a few different schools, and maybe win 5 or 10 cases per year out of the hundreds that get filed. Not a solution, but maybe better than nothing?
Unpaid labor - students get school credit, and its way more fun that sitting through lectures.
The law students worked on this for months for free and the paten troll got away without any fee. I don't see what's so brilliant about it. Looks like shity system to me.
[+] [-] emptywindow|11 years ago|reply
- Prof. Jonathan Askin - @jaskin - runs the clinic, and trusted us to try this experiment.
- Maegan Fuller - @mafuller21 - did the lion's share of research and writing. Brilliant and dedicated student. She just took the bar exam.
- Jorge Torres - @jorgemtorres - Guy who actually knows patent litigation. Too bad he dropped out of law to be a VC. Pitch him :-)
[+] [-] keithpeter|11 years ago|reply
Does that mean that if the troll tries this on with someone else, this case can't be cited? Just wondering.
[+] [-] nkurz|11 years ago|reply
...
"After reading it, and weighing the recent Supreme Court decisions, the troll simply dropped its case against CarShield. After months of dedicated work, the clinic students deserved a gavel-banging judicial decision in their favor. All they got was a quiet withdrawal. But I think we can still chalk it up in the win column. The case is dismissed (for now), the students learned real patent litigation skills."
Does the decision encouraging "fee shifting" require that the case go to trial? Does it require that the fees actually be paid by the defendant? Or might the law school students still be able to receive payment by the troll for their pro bono defense? It seems like the "new standard" would be much more effective if it also applied in cases like this.
[+] [-] teachingaway|11 years ago|reply
Nope. It only requires that the case is "exceptional" -- in the sense that the plaintiff filed an exceptionally crappy lawsuit.
>> Does it require that the fees actually be paid by the defendant? Or might the law school students still be able to receive payment by the troll for their pro bono defense?
I haven't looked into this myself, but my law students tell me that we can get fee shifting even for pro bono work.
[+] [-] Natsu|11 years ago|reply
One thing I wonder is if patent defendants in a situation like this might win from publishing all of their legal research on the patent online? It seems like this might help future defendants if there was anything interesting and I believe a tactic like that was used with some success against Microsoft in some of the state antitrust lawsuits long ago.
[+] [-] dang|11 years ago|reply
Bravo!
[+] [-] thinkcomp|11 years ago|reply
However, it shouldn't be that way anymore--not after Citizens United. I'm fighting a lawsuit about this issue right now, and if I win (however unlikely), corporations will be able to represent themselves against patent trolls.
Is it difficult, confusing and complex work? Yes. Is it any harder than programming, or anything else a serious startup would do? Not really. And it beats paying a law firm six or seven figures.
The case is:
http://www.plainsite.org/dockets/29himg3wm/california-northe...
[+] [-] dave1619|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teachingaway|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] allochthon|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] monochromatic|11 years ago|reply
This is a little disingenuous. You know the patent doesn't cover the "gist" or any particular figure. It covers the claims (which you don't mention at all, even in passing). And for some reason, you don't even tell us what the patent number is so we can look at it for ourselves!
From a little googling, I suspect that we're talking about Pat. No. 6,775,356. But why hide the ball and characterize the patent as "not particularly innovative" when you could just let people see it for themselves?
https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=patentimages.storage.goog...
[+] [-] AnthonyMouse|11 years ago|reply
It seems like whenever anyone criticizes a patent by summarizing it, someone points out that the patent is defined by the claims, but if anyone criticizes a patent by reading the claims, someone points out that the claims have to be read in the context of the rest of the patent.
[+] [-] jtzhou|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teachingaway|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] funkyy|11 years ago|reply
When reading articles from Medium I feel like I am not only not wasting time but acquiring knowledge in extremely fast pace.
[+] [-] josho|11 years ago|reply
I wonder if invalidating patents, that trolls commonly use, a good use of a law student's time?
[+] [-] nlh|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teachingaway|11 years ago|reply
I think it would be a great use of student time to identify the most egregious patents / trolls and try to invalidate their patents.
[+] [-] talmand|11 years ago|reply
From what I've read, it seems if a patent troll feels they might lose the case they'll drop it. Why risk losing the patent when you can just move on to the next mark?
[+] [-] u124556|11 years ago|reply
Yet the startup and the judicial system already lost time on this. There should be a fee for withdrawing cases like this.
[+] [-] cbd1984|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TallboyOne|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheMagicHorsey|11 years ago|reply
I've seen a lot of horseshit patents asserted against start-ups. If there was an organization that followed the troll around and offered defense services against all of their defendants, it would make trolling a lot harder, and might reduce the numbers of these parasitic lawyers involved in this shameless trade.
I just read about a Fish & Richardson patent partner who started filing his own "inventions" with the patent office, based on slight modifications of the patents he was filing for clients, and then sold those patents to trolls for huge sums. Its actually really easy to write patents focused on sabotaging your clients, if you are a lawyer and become familiar with their future roadmaps.
I know a bunch of trivial claims I could write right now and they would be worth a few million in a couple years, because Google, Facebook, and others would have to move in that direction in a few years (related to Machine Learning and image recognition).
All you have to do is follow conferences, understand the papers, and then write some trivial, and obvious evolutions of those techniques. Obviousness is something defendant's find extremely difficult to prove for highly complex technology, because the juries are made of people that have no idea what programming is, much less Machine Learning, and the judge is probably some moron, that thinks he is really smart, and assumes that he patent office is full of diligent geniuses ... and so he will give a lot of weight to the plaintiff's "USPTO certified" claims.
All it takes is for a programmer to be involved in one patent litigation and you see the patent system for what it is. A colossal system of giant, continuous, expensive injustice implemented in the hope of preventing an extremely rare form of injustice (when a true original inventor is cheated by a shameless larger company).
Imagine we institute an expensive system of highly trained commandos to follow every nerd in America around in high schools across the country, to protect them from bullying and to be their friends. It would certainly stop all physical bullying. But would it be worth the giant overhead/expense?
That is what we have to start asking ourselves. Even if the patent system prevents some rare injustices, WTF, is this continuous, and overwhelming cloud of uncertainty for every start-up and company worth it?
I feel like China and India are doing quite alright without overburdensome strong patent protection. And Europe seems fine with a hamstrung software patent system. And even in the US, Microsoft, Oracle, Adobe, IBM, and Apple got their start before software became patentable ... and they all did, and are doing fine.
If you see someone arguing for patents, they are almost always some fucking lawyer, troll, or someone sitting on a giant portfolio. The people actually making software every day don't want this shit system. VCs that fund start-ups, don't want it ... even though you would expect they want it, to protect their investments.
[+] [-] dragonwriter|11 years ago|reply
Such an organization might be eligible for tax-exempt non-profit status as a trade group, but it doesn't seem likely that a firm dedicated to providing services to a particular class of for-profit business would qualify as a 501c3 with tax-deductible donations.
[+] [-] teachingaway|11 years ago|reply
Part of the problem is making it scale. It takes a lot of man-hours to defend a patent litigation case. Its certainly possible to set up such a non-profit... its just difficult. We're working on it!
[+] [-] vertex-four|11 years ago|reply
Why should there be? Why allow VCs and other investors to externalise the costs of doing business, as arbitrary as those costs might be?
[+] [-] will_brown|11 years ago|reply
First, I am not sure if the EFF defends such suits, but I believe they challenge the validity of patents held by various patent trolls.
Secondly, 481 days ago I proposed the idea of a crowdfunding website for the purpose of posting demand letters from trolls, allowing donations to challange specific patents if goals were meet Did not receive much interest from HN at the time. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5573778
[+] [-] rayiner|11 years ago|reply
I'm sympathetic to the plight of startups having to deal with the trolliest of trolls, but give me a break. There are so many worthier avenues for pro-bono legal work than helping out for-profit companies.
[+] [-] throwawaykf05|11 years ago|reply
Even then, empirical evidence suggests that the use of patents by small firms against large ones is not as "extremely rare" as you think it is. From http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1396319:
"... public and large private companies initiated 42% of all lawsuits studied, 28% of the time against other large companies... 4% of the suits were initiated by individual inventors (David v. Goliath), 18% of the suits were brought by small private companies against public or large private ones (small v. large), 16% pit one small- or medium-sized company against another (limited stakes), and in 8% a large firm sued a small one (predation profile)."
So at least 22% of lawsuits involve a "small guy vs big guy" scenario. But considering that trolls (who, surprisingly, file a relative minority of suits, the study finds) often buy patents from individual inventors / small companies who cannot litigate themselves, that number may likely be higher. Now this says nothing about the merits of the lawsuits, but there certainly are a lot of small firms taking on bigger firms.
Now setting aside your strawman that the intended use is only small vs big, at least two-thirds of the time patents are used by operating firms against a comparably sized or larger firm. That indicates that the majority of the time the system is not being abused, even if you make the questionable assumption that all big vs small and troll suits are completely meritless.
> I feel like China and India are doing quite alright without overburdensome strong patent protection.
Really? I don't see many notable technical innovations come out of those countries, and I say this as a citizen of one of them. They are very good at reproducing technology, no doubt, but invention is rare.
> And Europe seems fine with a hamstrung software patent system.
If there's one thing the smartphone wars showed us, it's that other countries have software patents of similar quality as the US. The litigation environment is very different, though.
Also, citation on the Fish & Richardson lawyer? IANAL, but that sounds like shenanigans that could lead to disbarment.
[+] [-] darksim905|11 years ago|reply
I'm glad they didn't have to the pay the troll, but I also hate when the troll doesn't get what it deserves, either: losing.
[+] [-] curiouscats|11 years ago|reply
This seems similar to a house that had an alarm system. The thief opened the door and started to look for good stuff to take then heard the alarm go off and ran away. Mainly I would say the home owner "won" in that case by not having their stuff taken. Though it is annoying that the thief could come back and they have to deal with the thief's break in attempt. And it is annoying the thief wasn't caught and put in jail to prevent them from just going to the next house and breaking in there.
[+] [-] rurounijones|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teachingaway|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Confusion|11 years ago|reply
Question 1: has the lawsuit been filed in an odd/irrelevant place? Followed by some subquestions to be more precise. If so, fill out this form, include the addresses of .. and ... and we'll send a form letter to them for you, asking for a dismissal.
Question 2-5: keep stalling and asking for dismissals based on various reasons.
Question 6-10: try some other ways to get the troll to drop it, for instance by presenting an example of obvious prior art
Of course all letter include repeating references to relevant higher court decisions.
[+] [-] thro1237|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ProfOak_|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] otterley|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aceperry|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peterJHS|11 years ago|reply
While helping out gives the students experience, it's not reasonable to consider this any sort of real option beyond an occasional situation in which a startup can solicit a law-student who takes on a single case as part of their curriculum.
[+] [-] ilikemustard|11 years ago|reply
From the sounds of the article, there is one small clinic in Brooklyn that makes this a "real option" for companies. It's not like every company that faces patent trolls can rely on it, but I don't think it would be far-fetched to think that other law clinics may begin to (or already do) offer similar services.
As I see it, it's a win-win for both parties.
[+] [-] teachingaway|11 years ago|reply
Unpaid labor - students get school credit, and its way more fun that sitting through lectures.
[+] [-] zavi|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gear54rus|11 years ago|reply
Stick it to them! Good work.
[+] [-] pantaril|11 years ago|reply
The law students worked on this for months for free and the paten troll got away without any fee. I don't see what's so brilliant about it. Looks like shity system to me.
[+] [-] dang|11 years ago|reply