mod parent up - this is exactly the issue: convenience. And as a Californian who tries to follow the tax laws, it kills me every year to have to manually add up my online purchases and pay a use tax. Thanks Amazon - great convenience there for me. This is basically Amazon trying to help millions of my fellow citizens avoid following the law.

Existing contracts made before bankruptcy (and that are not fraudulent attempts to avoid creditors in anticipation of bankruptcy) survive bankruptcy. Now you might not get any money you are owed under the contract, but a company can't simply void contract deals in bankruptcy. If you're licensed to a patent, you will be licensed even after the patent ownership changes hands.

The crazy thing about this suggestion is that it is exactly how patent damages law is written right now. I quote thus:

Lost profits or a reasonable, market-based licensing fee is exactly what the standard is now. The problem is that no one can "prove" what a reasonable, market-based license fee should be and it just gets thrown to a jury that has no idea what the reasonable award should be (jury awards $98 for every copy of MS Word due to infringement of patent on custom XML).

I think for most users the novelty of Facebook has worn off. I noticed this myself as well. When you first join, you start getting friended by all kinds of folks you used to know. Your curiosity is very high, and it's entertaining for a while. Then the months pass. Eventually you are rarely friended by anyone new. Most friends that will join and find you already have. And you've already reached out to most you know. Then it's just an endless stream to the same old friends posting about the same old things.

Still can be useful, but the novelty has worn off.

I think Facebook's greatest flaw (and Twitter's greatest strength) is that once you hit the roof on your friend list, there are few surprises. Whereas Twitter allows serendipitous exchanges precisely because it is public. Privacy is good - but it won't challenge you as much as openness. And that may get boring.

There is a better way to solve this given that both parties have some legitimate interest they want protected. Customers want the ability to complain, providers want the opportunity to remedy complaints before permanent comments are published. So enter into a contract that says that customers will give providers a week's written notice before they publish a negative review, and an opportunity for the provider to remedy any perceived defect in the service. That kind of agreement shouldn't rankle either party too much AND would probably lead to happier transactions to boot.

Yup. You don't get to release a product to the public and then 20 years later try and go patent it. You've got one year from the release of the product to file for a patent. If not, you are out of luck.

From the Federal Circuit opinion describing the damages calculation: "[H]e first chose an appropriate "benchmark" in order to value Microsoft's use of the claimed invention at the time of the hypothetical negotiation. Wagner chose a product called XMetaL as his benchmark, which had a retail price of $499. To calculate the licensing fee, Wagner multiplied the price of XMetaL ($499) by Microsoft's profit margin (76.6%), based on his assumption that any licensing fee would be a fraction of the profits. Wagner then applied the 25-percent rule to this number, which assumes the inventor will keep 25% of the profits from any infringing sales. This resulted in a baseline royalty rate of $96." So basically take a specialized program that sells for $500, apply Microsoft's entire profit margin to it, and then take 25% of that. The answer to your question is that this is just a number someone made up choosing some arbitrary anchor points to make it sound superficially like "analysis."

The issue here is more than about infringement or validity. One of the biggest problems in patent law is lack of predictability in how much a valid, infringed patent is actually worth. How much should Microsoft pay? Here, they're being ordered to pay $98 per copy of Word over a little used feature. Now, admittedly, Microsoft isn't appealing that determination due to some technical snafus (also a big controversy). But it's not like this is a meritorious result.

I hate patent trolls as much as the next guy, but it's a little misleading to complain about being hauled into the U.S. legal system as a foreigner. U.S. patents only have legal effect for U.S. sales. If you sell significant enough quantities to make a patent suit worthwhile in the U.S., you've got a decent U.S. presence. That said, congratulations for beating a troll in East Texas - and before trial no less. Not an easy thing to do.