Does anyone see groklaw as a credible source any more? They used to have good reporting, but all I've seen since the Apple v Samsung verdict is spittle-flecked ranting.
Why is it ranting? They still post insights of how the law and the whole process works which is very useful for us lay people. Her arguments are still well formed and she makes good points, regardless if you agree with her bias. A biased post can still be insightful and useful.
If what you're really bothered with is the bias. Then I suggest listening to TWIL. They're almost as through, and they at least try to stay neutral. (Their recent discussion on this case had actual lawyers defending both sides, and even those defending Apple agreed with the point PJ is making in this post).
Let me give you some examples from the current post that strike me as BS:
"But, in contrast, here's the Apple design patent, D504889, about those rounded corners -- how do you code around it? A tablet in the shape of a parallelogram?"
But the jury found Samsung's actual tablets, which are rectangles with rounded corners, do not infringe this patent. So her analysis that it's impossible to design around this is false.
Here's one from another recent post:
"Apple's lawyers are still clueless that the public is for the most part repulsed by Apple's IP aggression."
This isn't supported by any evidence and is almost certainly made up. I'm not aware of any survey supporting this claim.
At this point, I'm unable to tell which information about the case on Groklaw is factual and which is made up. As far as I can tell, the quotes from actual court documents are accurate, but I can't really tell about the rest.
Her point was that the patent shouldn't have been granted in the first place. It shouldn't take the expense of big enterprise teams of corporate lawyers taking it to a jury trial to say that the patent wasn't infringed (I take it that's all it was, and that the patent hasn't actually been invalidated, either).
Copy-and-pasting from a comment I just made in another thread about how merely having an obvious patent does cause problems: You don't have to contest the patent for it to be suppressing others' design. I once worked for a company that made a humidifying air pump. We had to have the water tank held in with a removable flap rather than a door because our main competitor had patented 'holding the tank in with a hinged flap/door'. Sure, you could fight it in court, down the track, after hardware design (which is much more expensive than people realise). Or you could move onto the next problem and have a slightly inferior product.
Her apparent point was that there is no way to design around it, which is false. The claim was not about obviousness or validity of the design patent, but rather that it's really dangerous because there is no way to design around it. Which is clearly false. You may well have a valid point, but it's not what the Groklaw post said.
It's worth noting that Apple won on "rounded rectangles" as they applied to the iPhone (instead of the iPad). That certainly complicates any attempted workarounds.
Did Samsung not cite the Domino in the Prior Art? WTF "a hand-held computing device with a rectangular shape, rounded corners, and devoid of buttons" etc. "it has a touch-enabled surface communication technology called "Braille..."and"infite power supply"[1] <pls excuse: sarcasm>
The Domino can be disregarded. Only prior art that can run software compatible with Apple hardware can be considered. The Jury foreman explained it better than I could as follows:
The software on the Apple side could not be placed into the processor on the prior art and vice versa. That means they are not interchangeable. That changed everything right there.
This is widely recognized as blatant misunderstanding of what constitutes prior art by the jurors. "software compatibility" has absolutely zero relation to the notion of "prior art". This is one of the sorest points in this judgement, which has absolutely no credibility overall.
I have found their coverage (of Apple v Samsung) useful. The only other outlet that covered some of the more unusual aspects of the verdict and the post-trial jury interviews (that I saw) was BBC.
I saw the same factual coverage of post-trial jury interviews on, e.g., The Verge, without GrokLaw's implausible legal analysis that this would cause the verdict to be thrown out.
Like Groklaw, they seem to have their own opinions and eschew the bullshit-objective style of modern mainstream news, whereby all claims and opinions are treated as if equally valid.
"Maybe it's time to pay the money and let everyone go back to making cool shit," is how The Verge ends one piece.
It's true that Groklaw's stance has been opinionated, but I don't think that has gotten in the way of reporting this story.
Groklaw has proven pretty reliable in prior cases. Se's never truly impartial, but almost always quite close to the truth. And I can understand her, this really is an ugly set of cases.
Groklaw's approach worked well in SCO v IBM because SCO was a fraud so the story was entirely one sided. Unfortunately not all cases lend themselves to the open and shut "us vs them" mentality. Basically they've become the MSNBC to Florian's Fox News. Which is to say more sympathetic (Florian is a paid shill after all, a revelation we have Groklaw to thank for) but still not what I want from a legal tech news blog.
That analogy is not perfect, I do read and find value in both but the bias can be horribly grating and would love to find a reliable substitute.
Speaking of which The Verge's coverage has been excellent although there's a lot of forced false equivalence and it's pitched to a slightly lower information audience (I guess this make them CNN in my bad analogy?).
