On September 5 2012, AJL Pender (who I assume is a Judge) granted HTC Corp.'s motion to cut Apple's Pre Hearing Brief for failure to comply with ground rule 9.2, which provides a page limit to briefs. In other words, the International Trade Commission actually has a page limit for the amount of information and claims that can be covered in any given brief. Ground Rule 9.2 asserts that “The pre-hearing brief shall be a complete
stand-alone document” that “shall not exceed one-hundred seventy-five
(175) pages and shall have no more than fifty (50) pages of relevant
attachments." The article seems to stipulate that Apple was penalized because of a simple breach in a page limit ground rule. Although as university students we are all too accustomed to the concept of page limits and formatting rubrics, I feel that when so much money and credibility is at stake with billion dollar companies, such trivial matters should not matter. The fact that HTC gained an upper hand on Apple simply because of a breach in the technical page limit format seems ludicrous to me and something that should perhaps be reevaluated when discussing patent litigation for Electronic Devices with Communication Capabilities.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJJL3Ufnv0g
Hahaha, I find this a bit hilarious. It's silly that a company so large with well paid lawyers would actually read the rules and comply! I wonder how this cut will effect the outcome of the case!
ReplyDeleteI agree with Alisha, you would think that Apple which has such a large legal department wouldn't make a mistake on something as simple as this.
ReplyDeleteThat said, I actually disagree with you Aviv about the triviality of the matter. Courts have to process unbelievable quantities of patent lawsuits every day, especially recently with all of the patent wars in the mobile technology space. Could you imagine if each of these contained thousands of pages of materials for judges and juries to go over? I think the page limit is an important part of maintaining what little efficiency the system currently has.
Yuval, I agree that there needs to be a limit to such legal documents, but to think that certain technologies and innovations could be summarized in that limit is quite hard to imagine. Perhaps an "abstract" could be used to summarize the basic points, but certain inventions may need more than 50 page attachments to sufficiently explain their products with diagrams. When billions of dollars are at stake I think being thorough is most important while efficiency comes in close second.
DeleteInteresting.. the same problem was addressed by Judge Koh in the Apple vs Samsung case but I think she ruled the page limit to even less. I wonder if it's because the documents were written with very specific technical details that are required in patents.
ReplyDeleteWhat is even more ridiculous is that the judge was penalizing in this case on the basis that some of the explanation of the brief was included in the attachments.
ReplyDeleteIt's pretty funny that this rule exists, although, you can totally see why it's justified; there is enormous strain on the legal system caused by the depth and complexity of these cases as it is. Can you imagine what it would be like if the complexity was unbounded?
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