

Does Familiarity Breed Contempt Among Judges Deciding Patent Cases? - dctoedt
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2347712

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throwawaykf05
"Notably, the relationship exists for rulings finding noninfringement;
judicial experience had no relationship to the likelihood a judge would find a
patent invalid"

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dfc
Thank you for posting this. This is yet another argument in favor of the "do
not editorialize in titles" policy.

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dang
We changed the title to be that of the article. (The submitted title was
'Lemley: "more experienced judges are less likely to rule for the [patent
owner]"'—which, to be fair, is an accurate quote from the abstract.)

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rz2k
Reading the title as it now provides interesting material for brief thought
experiments. Since it isn't clear whether the judges tend to favor patent
owners or those with new products and services that may infringe, one can
imagine reactions to either finding. If the judges tend to favor the
new/infringing products, then we can imagine a reaction affirming the judges'
status as experts, and saying that the perspective from that status further
proves how messed up the system is. Alternately, we can imagine that the
judges are consistently finding in favor of patent holders, and begin winding
up to deliver an explanation of how the problems of the system are exacerbated
by judges who have little familiarity with the technology.

I could be wrong in imagining that the reactions are so malleable, but if they
are it says to me that this type of survey treatment of the data is probably a
worthless exercise in confirming biases. A bias toward believing there are too
many patents issued for ideas that are not novel can be correct, while at the
same time anything that confirms the same conclusions regardless of opposite
findings is probably a waste of time. I could also be missing the point of the
paper though.

