[michaelt]

Of course, within the current justice system it will often make sense to hire an expensive lawyer. You are in a spending arms race with your opponent. The problem is this is a fault of the system.

We want a system that produces the fairest outcomes possible, and there's more than one way unfair outcomes can be produced. Under the current system, if I had a patent and Oracle infringed upon it, I would be denied justice because I don't have $100M of cash to pay to litigate.

If we had a German-style fixed fee system where any patent dispute could be resolved for a flat fee of (say) $20,000 I would not be denied justice. The rich would not have an advantage over the poor in court. On the other hand, this would deny Google and Oracle the opportunity to spend 5,000 times as much to get the dispute analyzed in (what was presumably) a great deal of detail. Is that a bigger injustice than the fact I couldn't receive justice at all?

Personally I see this Oracle/Google dispute as like Bastiat's parable of the broken window - this case represents a net loss to society of $100,000,000+ as surely as if Oracle and Google had broken one another's office windows to the value of a hundred million dollars.