As depicted in the series, Terravision was less a company than a group of idealistic, club-going, art-hacking believers, who, with the right people and tools, could make great things happen.
Audience response to the series, primarily the depiction of a three-year legal battle between ART+COM and Google, has been nothing short of terrific. Rotten Tomatoes did not have enough reviews to give the series a critic’s score, but it awards The Billion Dollar Code an audience rating of 100%. IMDB shows it as 4 out of 5 starts on 6,108 votes.
While the production, writing and acting teams get so much right in this truly laudable series, they apparently failed to communicate with the marketing people.
The Billion Dollar Code is the most engaging, detailed and well-documented invention dispute to be depicted on film or television. Its importance cannot be overstated. Creators, investors and others need to better understand the invention process and the legal system that underlies it.
A New Jersey court ordered a patent owner to pay $14 million to a company it sued for patent infringement to reimburse that company for its attorney fees and costs in the litigation filed by the patent owner. The court based its order on the patent owner’s misconduct before the Patent and Trademark Office and the patent owner’s baseless positions during the litigation.
In 2005, Howmedica sued Zimmer for infringing four patents covering methods for improving the longevity of polymer-based medical implants. Over eleven years of litigation, federal courts invalidated each of Howmedica’s asserted patents. After the Federal Circuit struck down the last patent in 2016, Zimmer moved for an award of attorney fees and costs.
Courts may award attorney fees and costs to a prevailing party in patent infringement suits deemed to be “exceptional.” To determine if a case is exceptional, courts extensively analyze the facts and consider the totality of the circumstances. Circumstances that commonly contribute to finding a case exceptional include advancing frivolous or baseless claims, inequitable conduct during either litigation or prosecution before the patent office, and other conduct suggesting bad faith.
In the 1990s, as Mississippi's attorney general, Mike Moore launched a lawsuit against 13 tobacco companies that eventually resulted in a $246 billion, 50-state settlement. His state lawsuit had become a swarm of suits backed by dozens of states and elite private attorneys, and then a victory that Moore proudly called the "most historic public health achievement in history."
Chip Robertson, a former chief justice of the Missouri Supreme Court , said that many have tried to do what Moore is doing and given up. "Mike's not afraid of anybody because Mike believes that he's doing the right thing," said Robertson. A veteran of Moore's winning fight against Big Tobacco, he has now joined Moore's team ...
Purdue told NBC that Moore's assessment is "deeply flawed," claiming that its drug oxycontin represents less than two percent of current opioid prescriptions. According to Purdue, "illegal trafficking and abuse of heroin and illicit fentanyl" is the real culprit inAmerica's opioid epidemic.
In 2018, Dewayne Johnson, a San Francisco groundskeeper, was the first of the thousands of people suing the company to go to trial. A state jury awarded him $290 million, which was later knocked down to $78.5 million by the judge. Monsanto has appealed the decision.
California jury hits Monsanto with $2 billion judgment in cancer lawsuit. It's the largest payout so far and the third loss in a row for Monsanto in lawsuits alleging Roundup has caused or contributed to cancer.
A California jury has found that a popular weedkiller made by Monsanto likely caused cancer in a husband and wife and ordered the chemical giant to pay more than $2 billion in damages, twice what the plaintiffs' attorney had requested.
The jury found that Roundup was a "substantial factor" in his illness. The new verdict brings the total amount awarded to plaintiffs to more than $2.2 billion. Andrew Blankstein reported from Los Angeles. Andrew Blankstein is an investigative reporter for NBC News.
Bayer, which bought Monsanto in 2018, said in a statement that the company is "disappointed with the jury's decision and will appeal the verdict in this case," and that there is a "consensus among leading health regulators worldwide that glyphosate-based products can be used safely and that glyphosate is not carcinogenic.".
Adiel Kaplan is a reporter with the NBC News Investigative Unit.
After a five-week trial, the jury awarded $1 billion apiece to the Pilliods in punitive damages, plus another $55 million in damages.