If the patents were owned by a single individual instead of caltech, would the verdict be as large? They’d instantly be in the top 3000 richest people in the world.
Possibly. However, very few "single individual[s]" would have the resources to fund such inventions AND the associated patent procurement AND fund such a litigation. Moreover, this will be appealed and the final outcome could take a decade.
That's not how trolling works. Your out of pocket cost for patent prosecution is maybe $20K or $30K per. If you want to litigate, you enter into a contingency or mixed-fee arrangement with a plaintiff firm and possibly also a litigation financier, depending upon the size of your pocketbook and your appetite for risk. Your lawyers build up a war chest by shaking down easy targets until it's big enough that they can lay siege to a big opponent. It's become more difficult to do this than it used to be due to recent developments in patent law, but it's still eminently possible and happens all the time. This is, in fact, how plaintiff litigation works in a number of other civil case types.
Your last point has me thinking - hypothetically if an individual were in this situation, could they sell 'equity' in the eventual settlement in order to take money off the table now, rather than go bankrupt from legal expenses etc and get nothing?
E.g. Sell 50% of the initially ruled $1.1B settlement for, say, $100MM.
The patent game more then a 100 years ago was great for the sole inventor. Now it's a game that's insanely & wrongfully stacked against those folks. Nowadays you need a war chest behind you to secure patents and even worse fight for your rights in court against another war chest that will litigate for years and years until someone's war chest is depleted or almost depleted.
What's wrong with that? If the idea behind a company is worth say 10 or 20% of the company, then the idea of limiting a blogging service to 140 characters, or the idea of blurring people's smartphone pics to make them more "artsy," have been rewarded to the billions of dollars as well.
The Caltech endowment fund seems to be $3.2B. It seems like they're already pretty rich... and I suspect that lets them actually pursue these cases successfully.
They’ve managed to be broke twice in the last 20 years despite receiving three of the four largest donations in higher education history. I wouldn’t put it past them.
