Cry Havoc and let slip the dogs of Patent WAR! Samsung strikes back at Nvidia

Re: Lawyers win

Your statement is rather tired, and is actually rather ignorant of how the world works, i.e. people work for money, so they can buy things. Normally predicted on service specializations, for cross bartering using tokens AKA money. If you are lucky, you earn more that the next person, and/or more than you thought you would.

Yes, lawyers earn money by providing a legal service. Yes, a lawsuit uses that service. However, that does not mean they “win”, as in your implied statement that only the lawyers win in such actions. Usually, one or other side wins by getting the (or near to) the result they wanted – hence why they keep doing these things.

Under the logic of your statement, the garage ‘wins’ when your car breaks down, the supermarket ‘wins’ when you need to feed yourself, doctors ‘win’ when you get ill, etc, etc. Well, in a way they do - they win some work, but if they could not do so, they would likely not exist to be there to provide the service or product you want. Also, it does not stop you seeking out their services, as you need the car fixed, food, to get better, etc.

Taking this further, and to the specific issue, if there were no patents to protect the fruits of R&D, there would likely not be any R&D to come up with new tech (this is hard to prove conclusively, as that is too great a paradigm shift to really be able to work it all out – but do you work for free? No. so chances are this assertion is largely correct. You can see something along the lines of this in drug discovery – there is little R&D spent on 3rd world diseases, as there is not much money to be made. On 1st world minor ‘cosmetic’ issues, e.g. Viagra, – plenty of R&D).

I know, you might say no lawyers would be a good thing - but would it really? To really cut out all lawyers, you would really have to get rid of all laws – otherwise enforcing any form of law (in a fair and reasonable fashion – do you want to be tried for murder you did not commit with no representative?) would be impossible. Or rather, lawyers would always be there to do so. (Someone would offer to help out in a legal action, and someone would be willing to pay some money to get said help). Do you want to live in anarchy, or in peace enforced by, literally, force (since even if there are no laws, there is going to be someone bigger than you…). Probably not.

Bear in mind here that most of the changes that many would see as beneficial to society – e.g. holidays for staff, disabled access, cracking down on payday lenders, etc – they all had lawyers involved in any of: getting them on the table for discussion, getting the discussion agreed in a beneficial way, enacted. Put another way, sometime the lawyers work for you, and for free, or on the losing big bad corporate’s dollar.

You should also bear in mind the figures spent on other things - e.g. Samsung spends approx. $14 billion on marketing, compared to $13.2 billion spent on the R&D of the stuff in the first place - who won there? – given the cost of equipment, etc, probably the latte drinking marketing executives or media executives, or just the media moguls who own the advertising conduits (Google, papers, TV, etc).

…And let’s not even get into the morality or otherwise of how much some people are paid to act like a donkey (kicking things), getting other people to extract things from the ground for them… oh, whoops, maybe we already just did (by implication).

In summary: Put it in proper context, and take out the rhetoric