Mytheos Holt trashes Joe Nocera in the American Spectator over patent reform

**One sees from the title of the Holt post Dear Conservative Patent Reform Skeptics: Stop Backing the New York Times that one is dealing with a "guilt by association" piece rather than a substantive analysis of patent reform issues.

The Holt piece begins:


The number of Leftist interests and household names lining up to oppose patent reform continues to mount. Now, on top of trial lawyers, university administrators, and the architects of Obamacare, patent reform can add the New York Times op-ed page to their ranks.

And not just any op-ed page writer, oh no. No, this particular anti-reform rant comes courtesy of Joe Nocera, the man who has called Tea Partiers “terrorists” and accused Republicans of wanting to poison peoples’ food (despite never having met them until adulthood). Although, as at least one enthusiastic pro-troll blog blared, Nocera has won the Gerald Loeb Award, an award that has gone to the likes of Paul Krugman in 2011, and a veritable who’s who of Leftist polemicists along with him. Hey, I guess some prize is better than no prize. Just ask President Obama about the Nobel Peace Prize.



WARF gets trashed too:



Nocera could have saved himself the process of writing this entire embarrassing op-ed if he’d simply consulted Business Insider, which labels the UWM-affiliated entity he’s referring to — the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) — as one of the eight worst patent trolls in the market. Our gasping English professor is going to have to sit down.


And Mark Lemley, the professor who thinks Gary Boone invented the integrated circuit,
is praised:


No less an entity than Stanford Law School Professor Mark Lemley asks the question “Are Universities Patent Trolls?” in a journal article, and concludes that yes, sometimes, they are. I suppose Lemley doesn’t attend enough Manhattan press junkets to realize the error of his ways.



And, no, Lemley never retracted his foolish comment about Boone, or, separately, his incorrect assertions about the inventors of the transistor, based upon, you guessed it,
a non-existent article in the New York Times [see 8 JMRIPL 80 (2008)]

Getting back to "Dear Conservative," Dana Rohrabacher (R-Ca) is a conservative who opposes the present Goodlatte Innovation Act for "conservative" based reasons. How will Holt attack his credentials?


**Separately, within a Washington Examiner op-ed, one finds the text:


Littered across the Internet are various analyses that about 95 percent of pending lawsuits end in trial, and settlement prior to trial is in the low 90 percent range. Few — often cited as less than 1 percent of disputes — are ever settled by the court. To take one state as an example, in Florida only 0.2 percent of civil disputes even make it to trial. So to claim that only 1 percent of patent disputes end up in court is to say they are fairly common or maybe even more common in court resolution.



link: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/debunking-myths-about-patent-trolls/article/2575017

One might question a comparison of all civil suits in Florida to patent suits.
Maybe, "loser pays" is an item which bothers opponents of patent reform.