Developed in part by Mark Lemley (http://www.law.stanford.edu/node/166497)
http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/01/lex-machina-raises-a-round-as-ip-litigatio…
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One of the fundamental problems in intellectual property (IP) litigation is the lack of information available to both plaintiffs and defendants. The identity of the plaintiff and the defendant, the district(s), judge(s), and lawyers involved in a particular case, have a significant impact on the outcome of a litigation, including whether a particular litigation will proceed at all. While legal professionals have anecdotal and scholarly information on individual districts and judges, granular data on lawyers, courts, judges, and districts can be invaluable in litigation decision making.
Lex Machina, which just announced that it has raised a $4.8 million Series A funding round led by Boston-based Cue Ball Capital, aims to provide this information. As the number of lawsuits and verdict amounts increase to all-time highs, the information is becoming increasingly valuable. The company claims that total patent litigation cases filed have increased more than 100 percent in the last three years, and three verdicts over $1 billion for patent infringement have been awarded in the last eight months, while median damages awards in patent cases now exceed $4 million. Existing investors XSeed Capital, Costanoa Venture Capital, and Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang also participated in the round. According to Josh Becker, CEO of Lex Machina, Cue Ball found Lex Machina through AngelList.
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The fact that no one else came for Friday Filosophy gave me some time to think about the possibility of a different format for the weekly congregation.
In addition to the time of day being problematic for a meat/(vegan)space gathering, it seems unnecessarily old-fashioned to confine the conversation to any particular bounds of time and space anyhow. So, in the Kopimist spirit of post-neo-luddite optimism -- I propose that Friday begin a virtual and asynchronous form of worship that can last for whenever you have the time for it before the sudo-minyan meets on Sunday.
Rather than a particular form of chant, I propose the prayer take the form of a 'rant'. Due to the nature of this format, Ray gave a wise suggestion to cap it 2 pages/minutes, [as in 2 minutes of hate (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Minutes_Hate) in Orwell's 1984.]
Given this week's interest in bookmaking, I thought to start off a rant with a parable about the good old days when the people who made the books mattered.
from Robert Darnton's, The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie 1775-1800 (1979) ...
pg. 230
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To see into the life behind a fingerprint in the Encyclopédie is to get some sense of how men moved through the obscure channels of working-class history, but Bonnemain's thumbmark also can be studied for its typographical significance. It illustrates a point that is difficult to appreciate in an age of automation: the printers of the Old Regime left their mark on their books -- literally, in Bonnemain's case, and figuratively in all the others. For each workman stamped each page with something of his individuality, and the quality of his craftsmanship affected the success of the product.
Bonnemain's fingerprint really resulted from a typographical trick. By smearing the forms excessively with ink, he and his companion did not have to pull so hard at the bar of the press to get an impression. But the extra ink came off on their fingers and smudged the sheets during handling.
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