[problemdomain]

1. The numbers you're quoting sure are. Look at the chart and surrounding text again. And all you said was "Plaintiffs were only winning 20-40% of the time.". "Winning" in a patent case hinges on infringement. If you're not talking about infringement, what could you possibly be talking about?

2. That's not an answer to the question I asked, it's an irrelevant and evasive appeal to authority.

3. You're projecting.

[tzs]

1. I was talking about validity. A hint to that effect was that my sentence explicitly talked about the burden of proof of patent validity. To win a patent case, you must have a valid patent and that patent must be infringed. The plaintiff enters the case with an advantage by law on the validity issue, which was the point of #1.

I dealt with why the plaintiff has an advantage on the infringement issue in point #2.

2. You asked: "Do you actually follow the US legal system?"

I answered: "Yes". Please explain how that is not an answer to the question you asked.

[problemdomain]

You've done nothing to explain how the presumption of validity implies the plaintiff will ultimately win, nor how my analogy to the validity of a law is wrong.

If the answer were really just "Yes", you shouldn't have felt it necessary to bring academic credentials into the discussion, instead of just leaving it at "Yes".

We know from history that extremely weak cases are filed all the time, usually hopes of attempting to force a settlement, and that there have been few effective barriers to such tactics. There were even fewer barriers during the era before the Federal Circuit came to be.

Your bald assertion about "weak" cases being weeded out is contradicted by real-world observations of both the distant past and more recent history.

[jeltz]

In most cases I disapprove of flaunting academic credentials to strengthen an argument, since that is just appeal to authority. But in this case I feel it was relevant to your question.

[tptacek]

2. Yes. I acquired a passing familiarity with the US legal system in law school.

2. That's not an answer to the question I asked, it's an irrelevant and evasive appeal to authority.

Please stop.

[RHSeeger]

In this case he wasn't arguing that people should give more weight to his answer because he went to law school. Rather, he was responding to someone that asked if he knew anything about the law. As a response to that specific question, giving a context for how much he understands based on his background seems valid.

[tptacek]

You never know when the person you're bitching at on HN has a law degree. But now that it's clear that you don't: your objection is silly and the person you are objecting to knows more about this issue than you do.