George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School

It’s Time to Say “No” to Junk Science in the Patent Policy Debates

Last March, forty economists and law professors submitted a letter to Congress expressing “deep concerns with the many flawed, unreliable, or incomplete studies about the American patent system that have been provided to members of Congress.”  These concerns were confirmed again last week when Unified Patents released a report on patent litigation with the same kind of “highly exaggerated claims regarding patent trolls” that the professors were concerned about. 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

“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