Would such a move be enough to not be under the jurisdiction of the Eastern District? Google doesn't have any store there yet that doesn't stop any patent troll.
The following is an excerpt from the short article you're commenting on:
>Residency is also a factor in determining the applicable venue of a patent infringement lawsuit, but in May 2017, the Supreme Court shifted precedent by ruling that a U.S. corporation resides only in its state of incorporation. Apple is incorporated in California, not Texas, satisfying this clause.
>The plans are significant, as U.S. law states that patent infringement lawsuits may be filed "where the defendant has committed acts of infringement and has a regular and established place of business." By closing its stores in Eastern Texas, Apple is ending its established place of business in the district.
Moving a store from one district of Texas to another obviously doesn't relate to the question of the state of incorporation/residency.
IANAL, I can only go by what the article is saying. The article explicitly says "a U.S. corporation resides only in its state of incorporation".
"Residency" in this sense is evidently not the same as "having an established place of business". Apple is avoiding having an "established place of business" in the eastern district.
"Despite the limitations imposed by TC Heartland, § 1400(b) offers an alternative path to a desired district “where the defendant has committed acts of infringement and has a regular and established place of business.” Merely months after TC Heartland, which did not address this alternative, the Federal Circuit in In re Cray[3] rejected the Eastern District of Texas’ expansive four-factor test and set forth three requirements for determining whether a defendant has a “regular and established place of business” in the district: (1) there must be a physical place in the district; (2) it must be regular and established; and (3) it must be the place of the defendant."
The issue is that both of you chose to focus on one facet of a multi-faceted question and are now talking circles around each other.
As Aloha pointed out, SCOTUS has ruled that a corporation only has residency in its state of incorporation, so Texas no longer qualifies for Apple (as it could before the 2017 ruling).
You then pointed out that a case can be brought against a defendant if they have "an established place of business" in that district.
These are two facets of the same problem, and a thorough answer to OC's question requires both parts. It wouldn't make any sense for Apple to close their locations before the SCOTUS ruling, because a plaintiff could argue that they had residency there, regardless of where their physical places of business happen to be. One is the what, the other is the "why now?"
But I think Aloha's point was less "here is the entire explanation" and more "maybe if you RTFA you'd have the answer to your question". Which is what OC definitely should've done, rather than NOT reading the article and immediately going to the comments to ask a question which is answered in the article. Instead, you guys each answered half of the question and then started talking circles around one another.
The Supreme Court case (and subsequent rulings) eliminated what amounted to "someone might have conducted business in this jurisdiction" and narrowed it to, "place of incorporation" and "a place where the company has a permanent office and regularly does business"
"Despite the limitations imposed by TC Heartland, § 1400(b) offers an alternative path to a desired district “where the defendant has committed acts of infringement and has a regular and established place of business.” Merely months after TC Heartland, which did not address this alternative, the Federal Circuit in In re Cray[3] rejected the Eastern District of Texas’ expansive four-factor test and set forth three requirements for determining whether a defendant has a “regular and established place of business” in the district: (1) there must be a physical place in the district; (2) it must be regular and established; and (3) it must be the place of the defendant."
Google's army of lawyers and cash reserves keeps patent trolls away. Pt try to go after little and medium companies who don't have the time or resources to fight back. It's way cheaper to write a check and make the problem go away, rather than fight via expensive lawyers or getting audited before the shakedown.
Apple has larger cash reserves than Google. Also Google has spent years buying companies for their patent portfolios to help prevent patent trolls. But also many tech companies are joining groups like LOT Net to help stop this as well.
Your link doesn't support your thesis, and I don't know of any place that have such policy, except probably shitty places that didn't have good services in the first place.
Austin, Vancouver, San Francisco, Boulder. Can personally confirm that it’s a big public propaganda and policy thing in SF. You get people spending time washing out their bottles like we’re running out of glass or a place to put it.
I guess the right question is, was a basket containing Amazon.com, pets.com and all the rest overvalued? Amazon is up about 15X since its peak before the crash, the dow is at 3X over the same period.
So as long as AMZN was >= 20% of your basket, then it was fairly valued. Sounds about right.
> was a basket containing Amazon.com, pets.com and all the rest overvalued?
Yes. This has been extensively studied. Almost every investor who deployed new capital in the late 90s lost money on those investments.
> as long as AMZN was >= 20% of your basket
You’d have to torture causality to come up with a portfolio that would have made sense in the 90s and would have been 20%+ Amazon. It wasn’t even in the top 10 most valuable public companies by market cap [1].
Keep in mind, too, that $1 in January 1999 would buy what $1.53 does today [1]. Saying you’d be 20% Amazon in 1999 is the same as saying you’d have bought the stock then. Yes, of course—with that prescience you’d overperform.
Buying Amazon in the 90s is analogous to buying Berkshire in the 70s. It would have taken a prescient and outsized allocation decision which, ex ante, would have been difficult to justify.
A very large number of people were buying Amazon and the other internet stocks in the 90s. If not, there wouldn't have been a bubble. The part requiring the magic genie would be not selling it for the next 20 years... :)
Amazon also aggressively and effectively expanded from being "just" a bookstore to a cheap store that sells everything, and diversified even further by effectively creating the multi-billion dollar cloud computing market, which in turn created the hyperscaling startup boom. Amazon deserves that valuation for that (not so much for its extorsion of its employees though; you'd expect one of the highest valued companies of the world to pay its employees accordingly)
I don't have any citations, but I do seem to recall reading articles saying that if you had bought and held a conventional sort of basket of dot-com stocks through that whole era you would have come out quite well.
Is there actually any reason why we should allow pet stores to sell animals at all? Even outside of radical animal rights, it seems like a breeding ground for terrible conditions for the animals.
In Ontario, an increasing number of pet stores house rescue pets on a temporary basis. At my local Pet Smart, there's a room of cats, 6 or 7. Mostly cohabitating. And every few days they bring half a dozen more. Those little floofs move fast, even the old ones.
Whenever I'm nearby I go in just to see the cats, but also to see all the "I've been adopted!" signs, that seem to make me feel just a bit better about things.
I certainly wouldn't call the conditions anything less than "acceptable". It's not a palace but they're not caged. They're in a maybe 8x8 room full of cat toys, blankets, water, food, gyms, etc.
Pets provide happiness for many people, and pet stores make more animals available as pets. Probably including options you wouldn't find at a shelter. And I personally don't see the harm.
(Disclaimer: I have never bought a pet at a pet store)
For those who didn't get the reference to Omelas (including myself) it appears to be to "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" 'a 1973 work of short philosophical fiction by American writer Ursula K. Le Guin. With deliberately both vague and vivid descriptions, the narrator depicts a summer festival in the utopian city of Omelas, whose prosperity depends on the perpetual misery of a single child'. [0]
If you want to dive into the philosophy... What is the relevant counterfactual? If the alternative to animals living in conditions below your standards is no animals at all, (or worse conditions), then I find pet stores to be morally good. If the counterfactual is happily living animals, or a world that is better in some other way, then you have an argument for me. But does banning pet stores create a place for happy animals? Or does it have some other effect that makes something else better about the world?
Me and people I've known growing up have found many, many friends in foster homes, vet offices, shelters, the street. Where profit motive doesn't really exist...
One thing that worries me about pet stores is that there is very little incentive for them to be on the lookout for animal torturing sadists. I'm really not sure what the solution is to that.
Hmmm, I don't know. I imagine it's harder to sell an animal with a PTSD-affected personality, so from that perspective, they're incentivized not to harm animals. Did you have something in mind where harming the animal makes it easier to sell?
It's easier to sell animals to people who torture them to death and buy another one like they're a disposable toy. This is a real problem that shelters and breeders deal with.
It's also something people should be aware of when selling or giving away a pet on craigslist.
Think of the number of people living in a large city, and compare that to the number of police officers in that city. It is a tiny percentage of "trained" people asked to protect the citizens. There is only so much you can do, only so many places you can be at one time. An investigation looking into stolen property requires so much effort for so little return. I would be very interested in knowing the number of open cases at any one time a single cop is expected to have to handle. I'd be willing to bet we'd all be surprised by the number. Just like any other profession, as you become senior, the tendency to become jaded is probably even more likely as a cop. We all want them to solve our specific need just like an episode of CSI or whatever, but that's not real. Being too busy to read email sounds just like a guy that is just waiting out his time for his pension. Oh, and there is a significantly larger than 0 percent chance that as they go about doing their job that they could be harmed if not killed. Would you be willing to take on that risk for something like stolen personal items that is covered by insurance?
So a student?