[ih] legal models [was: there must be a corollary to Godwin's law about Sec 230, was ARPANET pioneer]

[Bob Purvy]

If you'll pardon some bragging, I do have personal experience with German
lawyers and German courts. I think I earned my salary for my entire 11 1/2
years there on this one. (Oddly, Vint, I never talked to you about it.)
They are very, very good.

In 2014, things were looking
<https://www.themarysue.com/google-maps-facing-german-ban/> very bleak for
Maps in Germany. Microsoft had bought a patent for online maps, and the
German courts had found that Google Maps infringed it. They were actually
going to grant an injunction against Maps while the validity of the patent
was adjudicated. They use different courts for infringement and invalidity.

Naturally, all of us in Patent Litigation (I was a Tech Advisor) set about
searching for prior art. Things get thin before about 1996. A couple of
days, and nothing.

Then out of desperation, I went to Google Scholar and searched "client
server maps." Who'd have thought of *that*? The very first result was this
<https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.49.4371&rep=rep1&type=pdf>.
I made a claim chart and it seemed to work. I flew down to LA to meet our
two German attorneys from Quinn Emanuel, and our maps expert. We spent the
day looking for something a little less technical, but came up empty, so we
went with this.

Ralf Uhrich is honestly one of the 10 smartest people I've ever met in my
life. He has a PhD in computer science plus a law degree. He used this
paper and asked the judge to reconsider the injunction. Amazingly, he did.

Ralf later went to the Patent Court in Munich, and destroyed
<https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-loses-mapping-patent-tussle-in-german-fight-with-google-and-motorola/>
Microsoft's patent. Especially satisfying was that they tried to dispute
the date of the DeWitt publication, and Ralf produced a Microsoft press
release about their hiring of DeWitt. It cited that paper.

I didn't get to go to that, since I wasn't needed, but what I heard is that
their courts are much less formal than ours, and more down-to-earth. You
can just walk into the judge's chambers and talk to him, which would get
you arrested in the United States.

So if you claim lawyers and judges are stupid and don't understand tech:
no, you're wrong.

On Mon, Mar 7, 2022 at 2:10 AM Dr Eberhard W Lisse via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> My impression/experience is quite the opposite, lawyers are usually very
> clever people (they make a living using the word as a weapon so to
> speak, and can read themselves into complex issues amazingly quickly) but
> of course ambulance chasers might find that difficult.
>
> In Common Law countries judges are selected from experienced lawyers, ie
> it's further, positive selection. But, they only adjudicate the
> issue(s) before them ("on the papers") as narrowly as possible.
>
> So you get what you pay for.
>
>
> In Germany the grade of your law school exam and the one after the two
> year internship (akin to the Bar Exam) are the determining factor of
> becoming a (junior) judge and then progress to higher courts.  These
> courts adjudge a little wider and if there is complex matter the courts
> will hear both sides experts and perhaps even appoint one.
>
>
> Many judgements I have read (US, UK, ZA, NA and DE) to a reasonable to
> good job of framing the jargon into plain English/German.
>
> el
>
> On 2022-03-07 03:26 , Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history wrote:
> [...]
> > 2) You cannot assume that advocates and judges understand the
> > technology well enough to argue and adjudicate correctly. There's
> > been a persistent failure to distinguish value from reference, for
> > example, not helped by lousy terminology such as "address" when
> > a URL is meant (even without starting on the distinction between
> > URL, URN and URI).
> [...]
> --
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