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A comment on Patent Troll Lodsys Settles for Nothing to Avoid Trial. Parent comment

Re:Patent Troll Lodsys Settles for Nothing to Avoid Trial by sharkweek on Thursday October 03, 2013 @12:21AM (#6487149)
Honest question about i) loser pays cost --

What happens when Little Citizen Joe legitimately sues a huge company with lots of legal resources resulting in Citizen Joe getting out-lawyered? Is he burdened with the massive cost of that? Surely the company could drop XXXk in legal bills on him

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Re:Patent Troll Lodsys Settles for Nothing to Avoid Trial by scott_karana on Thursday October 03, 2013 @01:57AM (#6487423)
You're missing the other half of the equation. If Joe has legitimate grounds to win the lawsuit, high-dollar lawyers will flock to him, since their high fees will be fully paid by a huge company when they win.
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Re:Patent Troll Lodsys Settles for Nothing to Avoid Trial by vsl on Friday October 04, 2013 @08:36AM (#6494937)
You’re missing the part about costs being controlled. Their high fees won’t be paid — some portion of them will.

Similar system works where I live: there’s a well defined attorney hourly fee, which is what is used to calculate the reimbursement of attorney’s fees of the winning party. If you hired better lawyer, you still have to pay the difference from your pocket. Presumably the idea is to limit abusively large fees.

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Re:Patent Troll Lodsys Settles for Nothing to Avoid Trial by ethanazir on Thursday October 03, 2013 @03:31PM (#6491338)
Lawyer's fees will be higher dollar all around if loser is forced to pay.
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Re:Patent Troll Lodsys Settles for Nothing to Avoid Trial by Daniel_Newby on Thursday October 03, 2013 @04:23AM (#6487748)
What would actually happen is that high-dollar lawyers would not take low-dollar cases. Small fraud would be effectively legalized.
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Re:Patent Troll Lodsys Settles for Nothing to Avoid Trial by seabee on Thursday October 03, 2013 @05:53AM (#6487947)
Except that low-dollar cases are dealt with through a small claims court: http://www.adviceguide.org.uk/england/law_e/law_legal_system...
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Re:Patent Troll Lodsys Settles for Nothing to Avoid Trial by Daniel_Newby on Thursday October 03, 2013 @07:28AM (#6488190)
Perhaps. Fraud tends to require an extensive discovery process to establish the facts, but small claims court is optimized for cases where the facts are agreed upon but the application of law is in dispute.
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Re:Patent Troll Lodsys Settles for Nothing to Avoid Trial by kamjam on Thursday October 03, 2013 @10:09AM (#6488975)
There's also the police, whose job it is to investigate crime...
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Re:Patent Troll Lodsys Settles for Nothing to Avoid Trial by darkarmani on Thursday October 03, 2013 @12:02PM (#6489869)
Good. Small fraud doesn't really matter when you are talking about patents, because they are so expensive to get and litigate. Patents that aren't valuable shouldn't block innovation.
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Re:Patent Troll Lodsys Settles for Nothing to Avoid Trial by webjprgm on Thursday October 03, 2013 @01:21PM (#6490418)
Could we have loser-pays-cost only for patent lawsuits?
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Re:Patent Troll Lodsys Settles for Nothing to Avoid Trial by njharman on Thursday October 03, 2013 @12:29PM (#6490038)
Also, instead of Patent trolls there would be (even more) lawsuit trolls.

Every mechanism has a means to game it.

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Re:Patent Troll Lodsys Settles for Nothing to Avoid Trial by cobrophy on Thursday October 03, 2013 @04:01AM (#6487696)
It can. Although my understanding is that if one side purposefully generates high costs then they can get in a lot of trouble for doing so.

It's also worth noting that the UK is lowering the amount of fees you can get back. There's an upper limit on the percentage of fees you can get paid by the other side. This is essentially to introduce a higher cost to litigation through the courts and encourage sides to settle or go through an arbitration process.

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