It is common today to hear that it’s simply impossible to search a field of technology to determine whether patents are valid or if there’s even freedom to operate at all. We hear this complaint about the lack of transparency in finding “prior art” in both the patent application process and about existing patents. Read more
Category: Statistics
The One Year Anniversary: The Aftermath of #AliceStorm
The following post, by Robert R. Sachs, first appeared on the Bilski Blog, and it is reposted here with permission.
It’s been one year since the Supreme Court’s decision in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank. On its face the opinion was relatively conservative, cautioning courts to “tread carefully” before invalidating patents, and emphasizing that the primary concern was to avoid preemption of “fundamental building blocks” of human ingenuity. Read more
Intellectual Property, Innovation and Economic Growth: Mercatus Gets it Wrong
By Mark Schultz & Adam Mossoff
A handful of increasingly noisy critics of intellectual property (IP) have emerged within free market organizations. Both the emergence and vehemence of this group has surprised most observers, since free market advocates generally support property rights. Read more
Adam Mossoff on Patented Innovation, Licensing & Litigation (Transcript)
Below is the text of the oral testimony provided by Professor Adam Mossoff to the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, the Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Insurance Subcommittee, in its November 7, 2013 hearing on “Demand Letters and Consumer Protection: Examining Deceptive Practices by Patent Assertion Entities.” Read more
GAO Report Confirms No “Patent Troll” Litigation Problem
As we previously reported, there are serious concerns with the studies asserting that a “patent litigation explosion” has been caused by patent licensing companies (so-called non-practicing entities (“NPEs”) or “patent trolls”). These seemingly alarming studies (see here and here) have drawn scholarly criticism for their use of proprietary, secret data collected from companies like RPX and Patent Freedom – companies whose business models are predicated on defending against patent licensing companies. Read more
The Myth of the “Patent Troll” Litigation Explosion
[Cross posted at Truth on the Market]
In a prior blog posting, I reported how reports of a so-called “patent litigation explosion” today are just wrong. As I detailed in another blog posting, the percentage of patent lawsuits today are not only consistent with historical patent litigation rates in the nineteenth century, there is actually less litigation today than during some decades in the early nineteenth century. Read more
“Funny Math” Still Infecting Scholarship on Patent Cases in the ITC
Those claiming that we’ve seen an “explosion of patent litigation” in recent years have proven resilient to counterarguments, continuing even to generate questionable “statistics” to buttress their assertions.
Given the Obama Administration’s recent reversal of the International Trade Commission’s exclusion order against Apple in its patent dispute with Samsung, we are hearing once again that there has been an “explosion” of patents cases at the ITC. Read more