[Sussex] Patent bites patenter.

[Geoffrey J. Teale]

Paul Tansom <paul at aptanet.com> writes:

> On Wed, 2005-05-18 at 16:46 +0100, Angelo Servini wrote:
>> Ho ho ho ho ha haaa ha haaa!  Oh me painful sides!
>> 
>> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/05/18/microsoft_court_excel/
>> 
>> I fell off me seat --- I did!  Serves them b*** well right.
>
> True enough, but who here actually believes that the end result will be
> detrimental to MS? 

IT depends - when you have billions in the bank a few million
in licensing and damaging here an there is nothing more than an
annoyance.  

> Either the power of their legal team will string
> things out so far that the other side runs out of financing, their legal
> team will run rings around what the other side can do (I may be being
> unfair here in assuming that the extra money buys better, or possibly
> less ethical, legal representation*), or they settle out of court for a
> sum that is good for the other side, but a mere drop in the ocean for
> MS. In whichever outcome it will merely be yet another example of big
> business being able to do whatever they want against the little guy - be
> that small business or customer.

Interesting point.  One of the arguments made in favour of patents is
that the allow the little guys to protect themselves.  If this isn't
true in reality then the argument against patents is even stronger.

I've consciously not commented on this story so far because it would
be hard to make a stand against patents and celebrate someones
suffering at the hands of patent law at the same time.

> * I may be overly cynical here, but I tend to see the legal system
> (well, primarily the US legal system) as a means of using the law to win
> your case - as opposed to using the law to define what is right.

Well those people fighting the case will always attempt to use the law
to win the case (that is, by definition, what trial lawyers do in
every legal system).  The people who have to decide what is "right"
are the jury and/or judge.  Judgements create precedent which defines
a particular understanding of the law and can be cited in later cases,
but the fundamentals of law are defined by legislation.

With this in mind, to suggest that lawyers fighting a case should be
defining "right" and "wrong" is to introduce a massive conflict of
interest into the legal system.  Lawyers attempt to show that the
weight of legislation and precedent means that their clients case
should win - for a lawyer to back down from this and not argue a point
of law because they don't believe it to be morally correct would be a
failure on their part to do the job for which they are contracted.    

-- 
Geoff Teale
CMed Technology            -   gteale at cmedresearch.com
Free Software Foundation   -   tealeg at member.fsf.org