Douglas Bridges

I fried some turkeys last year but not going to worry about it this year. It is a very tasty way to cook them.

YouTube video by ATARASHII GAKKO! - 新しい学校のリーダーズ ATARASHII GAKKO! - One Heart (Official Music Video)

Listening to an alternative JPop group singing a gospel song about fighting through the hard times and loving each other.

youtu.be/Ie90LB-7nkA?...

I know that I cancelled my WaPo subscription but maintained my NYT one. I did get WSJ for free from the university that I teach at, but they cancelled that promotion, and it didn't lead to me signing up to pay them.

There is a much more appropriate location.

37°14'00.0"N 115°48'30.0"W

They should hire me. I can do it cheaper.

And the part that makes this whole equation difficult is that the small company probably thinks that their patents are worth $4b. Which makes it even harder for contingency fee lawyers to get involved, because - even if the patents are worth $100m - they will have to fight with the clients about it

I am a big fan of EPO opposition proceedings. I think that they work well to narrow patents and make them much better. The current IPR system is far too expensive and seen as adversarial while EPO oppositions are often filed between competitors.

Amen to that.

You threaten to IPR all of their patents and tell them that you have never paid any patent owner more than $100k for a license to their patents?

I am a big believer in strengthening the patent prosecution process. Half of the problems that we have (or more) is that we don't have good standards getting patent applications through, and this causes high costs and uncertainty in the litigation process.

Your hope for an exit plan was to be acquired by one of the large electronics companies who use of your technology could provide significant benefit to their products.

Your estimates are that the value of your patented technology to each of the companies would be $100m.

What do you do?

You are currently operating at a slight loss, but growing as a company and have gotten praise from the industry for your patented features. However, your gross revenues are around $2m per year and losses at $2.5m per year.

You have sent them C&D letters, to which they responded alleging that they don't infringe and that they have some prior art but that you don't think invalidates the patents and never took off in the marketplace.

Assume that you had approached the companies and made presentations to their mid-level executives and they expressed some interest in your technology, but eventually declined to work with you.

So if you are a smallish electronics company who has invested $150,000 into patents on your core technology and gotten 7 patents with two pending continuations, and three multi-billion dollar large companies integrated this technology into their products and released it, what would you do?

And I agree - somewhat - regarding weak lawsuits. I think that there are many patents that have significant issues in them - mostly from poor drafting. However, the line between strong and weak patent infringement lawsuit can often be very hard to determine if the patent was competently drafted.

I am no longer working as a contingency fee lawyer because it became economically impossible to do it. I wouldn't assert crap patents for $25k payouts, but I couldn't afford to risk millions for larger portfolios that might take years to payout.

Enjoy going to the management committee at your firm and ask them to be ready to front $1m in hard costs and $2m in attorney costs to get a group of five patents through IPRs so that you could then (maybe) start a 4 year district court litigation and possible appeal.

They did work until the laws got changed to make them harder and harder to bring. IPRs made it so that the law firm would have to front $200k in hard expenses per patent over 1.5 years to get past the bevy of IPRs filed against the patents. And that is before any chance of recovery.

Are contingency fees actually a good option considering the huge amount of hard costs that exist in patent cases - particularly expert witness fees. Why should the law firms be forced to be the ones to take the risk rather than financial institutions?

Is having more litigation funding a bad thing? I think that some of the terms offered by litigation funders are terrible, but having a way for IP owners to be able to protect their IP seems like a good thing, not a bad thing.

Everyone has known that there has been an increase in litigation funding available for patent litigation over the past five years (although it is still a painful process with AWFUL terms).

I think the big difference now is that there is more upfront money for NPEs to buy assets these days.

I'm sure nothing bad could ever happen from that.

Reading the /r/Cryptoscams subreddit is so depressing about the number of grandparents scammed into giving away their life savings.

Confused me. I assumed the orange juice was from oranges in Florida.

The idea of autonomous drone carriers is going to be the next big thing in warfare. Think of the power of autonomous, underwater drone carriers that can silently project assets across the globe both silently and cost effectively.

How will Kavanaugh afford to pay his mortgage?

Roll Tide.

Is this available as a decoration that goes into your hitch? I need.