On 7/13/05, Dan Ravicher <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >>Patentees only win patent infringement cases 1/3 of the time, so it is > >>not unreasonable to feel confident that a dispute would result favorably > >>for the accused infringer. Further, whether your company or any other > >>defendant could afford to defend yourself if sued has no impact on > >>whether a "condition" has been placed on you. That's your financial > >>situation, not a condition placed on you by a court or yourself. > > > > If you were inclined to place any weight on this sort of statistic, > > That statistic comes from ...
Of course it comes from somewhere reasonable; I have stipulated that you're on the saner end of the FSF spectrum. But it's still no basis for a claim that you have, or anyone else has, exercised "due care" with regard to any particular patent, let alone a suite of dozens that has withstood the kind of scrutiny that Fraunhofer's has. The Federal Circuit, en banc, characterized one defendant's reliance on a similar statistic (offered by their counsel and apparently relied on in good faith to the extent that that means anything) as "flagrant disregard of presumptively valid patents without analysis" -- and I can find no better words for it. Cheers, - Michael (I haven't read the Underwater Devices case, only citations to it in later cases; so I'm not entirely sure which party was the arrant infringer. Doesn't matter, except that it contributes to my already tortured syntax.)
