"patent reform" to serve the tech companies' own interests Peter Thiel proves Silicon Valley only hates lawsuits when it’s the one getting sued
May 27, 2016
..Silicon Valley purports to hate the legal system. To hear the tech world tell it, lawyers are leeches and regulations are mostly outdated. Lawsuits stifle innovation and waste money that startups could better spend developing products and recruiting more users, thereby making the world a better place.
But this contempt for the legal system is deeply hypocritical: It exists only insofar as the law is used against tech. As Peter Thiel’s recent attempts to take down Gawker Media demonstrate, Silicon Valley billionaires are more than happy to use the law to further their own interests.
..What Thiel’s example reveals is that tech execs don’t actually dislike lawsuits. They just don’t like to be sued. They have gone to great lengths to restrict the public’s right to litigate against them. Meanwhile, tech companies are free to litigate whenever it serves their own interests, even if that means abusing their power and making use of the legal system for purposes it was never intended to serve.
..Meanwhile, as tech companies flex their legal muscles, they’re doing everything they can to insulate themselves from legal fights brought by consumers. They spend gobs of money lobbying to kill state laws that impact them (including recent efforts in Michigan, Illinois, and Alaska). They litigate with each other over patents incessantly, but they call patent lawsuits “patent trolling” and fight the right of individual inventors to sue them. (Silicon Valley lobbying has contributed, by the authors’ count, to at least eight different “patent reform” bills currently before Congress.)
Tech companies in San Francisco routinely cycle through retainer agreements with every major law firm in the city, ensuring that those law firms can never represent consumers in disputes against them. Theypushed the federal courts to uphold unconscionable consumer arbitration agreements, under which consumers often have no choice but to sign away their right to sue the companies. Just last year, they argued a trio of cases to the Supreme Court in an effort to forever rid themselves of class-action lawsuits (Campbell-Ewald Co. v. Gomez,Tyson Foods, Inc. v. Bouaphakeo, and Spokeo, Inc. v. Robins).
That effort, thankfully, went nowhere. But we probably haven’t seen the end of Silicon Valley’s self-serving use of the legal system—or the self-serving story tech execs tell to hide their guilt.
https://qz.com/693760/peter-thiel-proves-silicon-valley-only-hates-lawsuits-when-its-the-one-getting-sued/