OSNews

This has always perplexed me in the jury-trial system. How is it that we trust average uneducated people to carry out correct decisions in highly complex and frankly arcane areas of discourse? Contrast how jury trials are done with scientific peer-review. The review process is anonymous, reviewers are chosen on track record and competence in the relevant field, and the reviewers never interact directly with the authors of the reviewed work or with each other (and thus there is next to no chance of emotional bias, tampering or banding). As such, the result depends, as far as is possible, on actual merit.

As an example of an incompetent jury, one need look no further than this trial's jury foreman, when he said in a later interview recalling a prior art issue: "The software on the Apple side could not be placed into the processor on the prior art and vice versa. That means they are not interchangeable. That changed everything right there." Had there been even a single software engineer or perhaps even software patent attorney in the jury, he would have called BS on that immediately (one patents algorithms, not the specific machine instructions). This statement was just grade A nonsense from a technical and legal perspective, but it sounds legit to people not familiar with the field.