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Comment by Zenst | Hacker News Reader

Whilst the motives are good it realy should be a simpler bill:

`If you take somebody to court and you lose the case then you pick up the cost of the defence and courts time.`

That is what is needed, something simple and fair that covers this and other area's instead of one law for a specific area which will then need another law for another area and in essence complicate things by having many laws covering one simple thing.

Keep It Simple Stupid is a such a great old software term, that applies to so many things, including this.

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TBH the entire court system would be better if money were a non-issue. The best way I can think of to solve that is to require both sides to be funded equally. i.e. if Side A wants better lawyers that cost more, then they should enough money towards a legal pool which is split equally between Side A and Side B. We will never have a just legal system until you eliminate this financial asymmetry.

That's actually a pretty good idea. I'm sure there are some implementation problems I haven't thought of yet, and ways for companies to get around it, but on the face of it a really good idea.

Doh! I think I'm becoming dsylexic in my old age. Missed a word entirely. Should have read "... then they should [contribute] enough money ..."

> If you take somebody to court and you lose the case then you pick up the cost of the defence and courts time.

Or: "IBM just screwed me over, but if I sue there's a chance I'll lose, and the penalty for losing is orders of magnitude greater than I could possibly afford. Guess IBM gets to keep screwing me over."

Uh huh. Which do you think is more common, your scenario or this one:

"IBM is suing me using twenty overly broad patents, most of which don't even apply. I'm pretty sure I can win in court, but it doesn't matter because the legal costs will bankrupt my company long before I can get a final decision. May as well sell out for pennies on the dollar - it's my only choice."

Their scenario.

The amount of times I've seen breaches of e.g. open source licenses dwarfs the number of patent cases I've seen. Generally, the creator has no recourse, because they can't prove it most of the time (closed-source product), nor can they afford the court costs if they wanted to, so it just slides. Sometimes changes are made (e.g. GPL-using code open-sourced), but often they aren't, and it's largely because the offended party is small and can't properly defend themselves, so it isn't worth it.

We were talking about patents, not copyright.

The root post of this thread suggested a general rule covering all lawsuits.

From what I've read, loser-pays is standard practice in Europe, and judges have final say over the amount, which must be reasonable.

Also the case in Australia and the UK. Not that the winner gets all their costs back (60% is a figure I've seen bandied around) but it still creates a significant disincentive. Probably a good thing in the case of patent trolls, but not necessarily in other situations.

They're certainly welcome to the overly-litigious situation we have in the US. I would trade in a heartbeat.

I think it's like that in Canada too.

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