Not a lawyer and haven't read that many rulings, but this one looked pretty normal and not that "sarcasm-oozing" to me. These decisions often come with elaborate reasoning behind them, with references backing them up. Sometimes they need to use a "common meaning" of a term rather than a legal one, and so they might cite a dictionary. At least that is what this one looks like.
The inverse of Poe’s law, or just a typical article trying to churn up some rageviews?
While Bing was poor for tech related searches in the earlier days, I find it's no longer true. Are you sure it’s 0 results on Bing? I get a bunch of relevant-looking results, and they’re all different from what Google gave me (just the first page):
Also, many open source proponents claim that open source software is more secure because the “many eyes” theory will lead to bugs and vulnerabilities being discovered sooner. This and other high profile exploits like heartbleed show how well this theory applies in practice is questionable.
> Alice Corp.'s patent claimed a form of escrowing that was well known.
Somebody told me that it was not really well known when the patent was filed. Apparently keeping shadow accounts was not really feasible without computers and networks, so such methods did not exist previously. I'm not sure how accurate that is, though. I'm not knowledgeable about that domain.
I read the claims of that patent, and they are all hardware claims. As in, the claims are literally in terms of registers in a CPU. I would imagine in an emulator would have data structures in memory to represent these registers, but it won't directly infringe these claims as written.
There is, however, the Doctrine of Equivalents. This says that if something uses different elements / components from what's in the actual claims, it could still be argued to infringe the patent if those elements perform a role equivalent to the elements in the claims. But I'm not quite sure how far that could be stretched.
The so-called study that came up with that "30 billion" number has been thoroughly debunked. Of course, the debunking of these things gets zero media coverage, because they get no rage views compared to "news" with outrageous numbers like that.
In fact, a lot of airplane innovation was happening in the US during that era despite the patent being in force. For instance the seaplane was invented in the US (by Curtiss, the Wrights' most bitter foe.)
Also their patents were challenged repeatedly and, despite being interpreted broadly, upheld repeatedly because they actually were that much of an improvement over the prior art.
Yes there are many, you just haven't seen any. Your perception is probably biased because you only get exposed to examples of bad patents cherry-picked by online media sources to drum up rage views. I've worked for a small company that got crushed by bigger incumbents but could only get a payout due to their software patents. However the much more common benefit of software patents are the countless startups and companies that got funded or had successful exits partially due to their patents. There are studies showing this sort of things. On mobile so can't find link, but see e.g. the work of professors like Robert P. Merges on ssrn.com.
While I agree with your overall sentiment, the Levine book is not a good reference. Here's a comment I'd posted about the book in the past:
I would be wary of taking that book at its word. The authors have an agenda and they are not afraid to twist historical facts to suit their narrative. I mean, their very first chapter begins with a lie which perpetuates the myth that Watt's patent retarded steam development [1].
When the authors of [1] called out Boldrin and Levine on this, the latter responded by fabricating new myths rather than admit that the truth undermined their narrative [2].
The very chapter you cite itself has such inaccuracies. I did not track down all the stuff they cite, but I did find an instance of mischaracterizing references to suit their view points. For instance, when they discuss the German dyestuff industry, they cite a study by Murmann to support their narrative that Germany dominated in that industry due to the lack of patents. But if you look at the actual study itself, Murmann paints (heh) a very different picture: German dominance in that industry was fueled by close ties with academic research, and later by R&D labs encouraged by, of all things, the newly introduced patent laws:
>When in 1877 German patent law protected dye innovations, a few German firms such as Hoechst, BASF, and AGFA saw the advantage of hiring organic chemists whose sole task was to synthesize new dyes. After these research chemists turned out economically successful dyes, firms hired more and more chemists and pioneered an entirely new corporate function, formally organized research. The birth of corporate research and development (R&D), which today is a standard activity in high-tech industries ... can be traced to the German synthetic dye firms in 1880s. By the 1890s the vast majority of dyes were being discovered in the R&D laboratories of Bayer, Hoechst, and BASF.
> Whereas in the early days of the industry a firm could exist by copying dyes invented somewhere else, patent laws made the systematic application of science within the boundaries of the firm a critical dimension of remaining a leader in the industry.
Moreover:
> The most important institution in the early success of the German dye industry was the university system, but patent laws were a second key factor that allowed the German firms to capture a dominant position.
With that many assertions in the study that refute their view, they cherry-pick a few comments and actually cite the study as one that supports their view.
With so many accuracies in there, I find it hard to take anything else they say in that book at their word.
Also, that accusation was purely a PR play by Google that IMO Bing refuted convincingly: http://searchengineland.com/bing-why-googles-wrong-in-its-ac...