Especially the cynical practice of filing known-baseless patent suits as described in the article. That behavior should get the company heavily fined, and land the responsible corporate actors in prison.

Prison seems fairly harsh. There are legitimate disagreements about what a patent covers, and to throw someone in prison over that would be ridiculous.

I'd agree with this. But maybe some kind of restriction on asserting patent claims when organisations repetitively make claims that don't stand up. Something to penalise this behaviour.

Agreed. Penalties should be in the same form as the motivation: money, and lots of it. Sufficient to make people think twice about asserting a bogus patent again; the amount they claim in damages would be a good starting point. Lose a suit claiming $100m in damages, pay that amount to the winner.

Yes, that's arbitrary, but less so than East Texas patent awards.

We only have the defendant's word that it was baseless.

I used to work for a law firm as a programmer/analyst, after that DMCA and changes to patent and copyright laws, it is easy to just sue a small company until their court costs and attorney fees exceed their income and they have to settle out of court or reach an out of court settlement.

Disney and other companies like DC and Marvel wanted the Trademark law to keep getting modified so they still owned the rights to their characters and they would not go into public domain as our founding fathers wanted.

Yeah, this is legal bullying, sort of like taking the competitor and roll them in a rug and start beating them with bats until they give up.

For me this only shows the flaws of the law system, doesn't it? The real problem is that defending costs are so high for businesses. If this would be covered by the government or some insurance until the case is resolved, the small companies that got sued could have fought this to the end and only go down if they actually infringed the copyright.

Loser pays makes filing these absurd cases a lot more expensive. If it's destined to lose and it's guaranteed to be paid, finding a lawyer is going to take it on is going to be really easy.

I think you mean to say "plaintiff loser pays". If the defendant loses, they shouldn't pay. Only then would finding a lawyer get easy.

Nope. Loser pays. This is the English system and it's generally up to the court to decide if this is the case, and if so, what amount is appropriate.

Example: http://www.sotosllp.com/2016/01/litigation-costs-in-ontario-...

Well what if the balls performance is due to patented innovations that the company wants to protect? We don't know the facts here, just some blogs opinion.