[First posted to the CPIP Blog on June 17, 2014]

Last Thursday, Elon Musk, the founder and CEO of Tesla Motors, issued an announcement on the company’s blog with a catchy title: “All Our Patent Are Belong to You.” Commentary in social media and on blogs, as well as in traditional newspapers, jumped to the conclusion that Tesla is abandoning its patents and making them “freely” available to the public for whomever wants to use them. As with all things involving patented innovation these days, the reality of Tesla’s new patent policy does not match the PR spin or the buzz on the Internet.

The reality is that Tesla is not disclaiming its patent rights, despite Musk’s title to his announcement or his invocation in his announcement of the tread-worn cliché today that patents impede innovation. In fact, Tesla’s new policy is an example of Musk exercising patent rights, not abandoning them.

If you’re not puzzled by Tesla’s announcement, you should be. This is because patents are a type of property right that secures the exclusive rights to make, use, or sell an invention for a limited period of time. These rights do not come cheap — inventions cost time, effort, and money to create and companies like Tesla then exploit these property rights in spending even more time, effort and money in converting inventions into viable commercial products and services sold in the marketplace. Thus, if Tesla’s intention is to make its ideas available for public use, why, one may wonder, did it bother to expend the tremendous resources in acquiring the patents in the first place?

The key to understanding this important question lies in a single phrase in Musk’s announcement that almost everyone has failed to notice: “Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology.” (emphasis added)

What does “in good faith” mean in this context? Fortunately, one intrepid reporter at the L.A. Times asked this question, and the answer from Musk makes clear that this new policy is not an abandonment of patent rights in favor of some fuzzy notion of the public domain, but rather it’s an exercise of his company’s patent rights: “Tesla will allow other manufacturers to use its patents in “good faith” – essentially barring those users from filing patent-infringement lawsuits against [Tesla] or trying to produce knockoffs of Tesla’s cars.” In the legalese known to patent lawyers and inventors the world over, this is not an abandonment of Tesla’s patents, this is what is known as a cross license.

In plain English, here’s the deal that Tesla is offering to manufacturers and users of its electrical car technology: in exchange for using Tesla’s patents, the users of Tesla’s patents cannot file patent infringement lawsuits against Tesla if Tesla uses their other patents. In other words, this is a classic deal made between businesses all of the time — you can use my property and I can use your property, and we cannot sue each other. It’s a similar deal to that made between two neighbors who agree to permit each other to cross each other’s backyard. In the context of patented innovation, this agreement is more complicated, but it is in principle the same thing: if automobile manufacturer X decides to use Tesla’s patents, and Tesla begins infringing X’s patents on other technology, then X has agreed through its prior use of Tesla’s patents that it cannot sue Tesla. Thus, each party has licensed the other to make, use and sell their respective patented technologies; in patent law parlance, it’s a “cross license.”

The only thing unique about this cross licensing offer is that Tesla publicly announced it as an open offer for anyone willing to accept it. This is not a patent “free for all,” and it certainly is not tantamount to Tesla “taking down the patent wall.” These are catchy sound bites, but they in fact obfuscate the clear business-minded nature of this commercial decision.

For anyone perhaps still doubting what is happening here, the same L.A Times story further confirms that Tesla is not abandoning the patent system. As stated to the reporter: “Tesla will continue to seek patents for its new technology to prevent others from poaching its advancements.” So much for the much ballyhooed pronouncements last week of how Tesla’s new patent (licensing) policy “reminds us of the urgent need for patent reform”! Musk clearly believes that the patent system is working just great for the new technological innovation his engineers are creating at Tesla right now.

For those working in the innovation industries, Tesla’s decision to cross license its old patents makes sense. Tesla Motors has already extracted much of the value from these old patents: Musk was able to secure venture capital funding for his startup company and he was able to secure for Tesla a dominant position in the electrical car market through his exclusive use of this patented innovation. (Venture capitalists consistently rely on patents in making investment decisions, and for anyone who doubts this need to watch only a few episodes of Shark Tank.) Now that everyone associates radical, cutting-edge innovation with Tesla, Musk can shift in his strategic use of his company’s assets, including his intellectual property rights, such as relying more heavily on the goodwill associated with the Tesla trademark. This is clear, for instance, from the statement to the LA Times that companies or individuals agreeing to the “good faith” terms of Tesla’s license agree not to make “knockoffs of Tesla’s cars.”

There are other equally important commercial reasons for Tesla adopting its new cross-licensing policy, but the point has been made. Tesla’s new cross-licensing policy for its old patents is not Musk embracing “the open source philosophy” (as he asserts in his announcement). This may make good PR given the overheated rhetoric today about the so-called “broken patent system,” but it’s time people recognize the difference between PR and a reasonable business decision that reflects a company that has used (old) patents to acquire a dominant market position and is now changing its business model given these successful developments.

At a minimum, people should recognize that Tesla is not declaring that it will not bring patent infringement lawsuits, but only that it will not sue people with whom it has licensed its patented innovation. This is not, contrary to one law professor’s statement, a company “refrain[ing] from exercising their patent rights to the fullest extent of the law.” In licensing its patented technology, Tesla is in fact exercising its patent rights to the fullest extent of the law, and that is exactly what the patent system promotes in the myriad business models and innovative

Filed under: intellectual property, licensing, litigation, patent Tagged: Elon Musk, innovation, open source, Patent, patent enforcement, Patent infringement, patent licensing, patent reform, Patents, property rights, Tesla

This was previously posted to the Center for the Protection of Intellectual Property Blog on October 4, and given that Congress is rushing headlong into enacting legislation to respond to an alleged crisis over “patent trolls,” it bears reposting if only to show that Congress is ignoring its own experts in the Government Accountability Office who officially reported this past August that there’s no basis for this legislative stampede.

As 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. In addition to raising serious questions about self-selection and other biases in the data underlying these studies, the RPX and Patent Freedom data sets to this day remain secret and are unknown and unverifiable.  Thus, it is impossible to apply the standard scientific and academic norm that all studies make available data for confirmation of the results via independently produced studies.  We have long suggested that it was time to step back from such self-selecting “statistics” based on secret data and nonobjective rhetoric in the patent policy debates.

At long last, an important and positive step has been taken in this regard. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has issued a report on patent litigation, entitled “Intellectual Property: Assessing Factors that Affect Patent Infringement Litigation Could Help Improve Patent Quality,” (“the GAO Report”), which was mandated by § 34 of the America Invents Act (AIA). The GAO Report offers an important step in the right direction in beginning a more constructive, fact-based discussion about litigation over patented innovation.

The GAO is an independent, non-partisan agency under Congress.  As stated in its report, it was tasked by the AIA to undertake this study in response to “concerns that patent infringement litigation by NPEs is increasing and that this litigation, in some cases, has imposed high costs on firms that are actually developing and manufacturing products, especially in the software and technology sectors.”  Far from affirming such concerns, the GAO Report concludes that no such NPE litigation problem exists.

In its study of patent litigation in the United States, the GAO primarily utilized data obtained from Lex Machina, a firm specialized in collecting and analyzing IP litigation data.  To describe what is known about the volume and characteristics of recent patent litigation activity, the GAO utilized data provided by Lex Machina for all patent infringement lawsuits between 2000 and 2011.  Additionally, Lex Machina also selected a sample of 500 lawsuits – 100 per year from 2007 to 2011 – to allow estimated percentages with a margin of error of no more than plus or minus 5% points over all these years and no more than plus or minus 10% points for any particular year.  From this data set, the GAO extrapolated its conclusion that current concerns expressed about patent licensing companies were misplaced. 

Interestingly, the methodology employed by the GAO stands in stark contrast to the prior studies based on secret, proprietary data from RPX and Patent Freedom. The GAO Report explicitly recognized that these prior studies were fundamentally flawed given that they relied on “nonrandom, nongeneralizable” data sets from private companies (GAO Report, p. 26).  In other words, even setting aside the previously reported concerns of self-selection bias and nonobjective rhetoric, it is inappropriate to draw statistical inferences from such sample data sets to the state of patent litigation in the United States as a whole.  In contrast, the sample of 500 lawsuits selected by Lex Machina for the GAO study is truly random and generalizable (and its data is publicly available and testable by independent scholars).

Indeed, the most interesting results in the GAO Report concern its conclusions from the publicly accessible Lex Machina data about the volume and characteristics of patent litigation today.  The GAO Report finds that between 1991 and 2011, applications for all types of patents increased, with the total number of applications doubling across the same period (GAO Report, p.12, Fig. 1).  Yet, the GAO Report finds that over the same period of time, the rate of patent infringement lawsuits did not similarly increase.  Instead, the GAO reports that “[f]rom 2000 to 2011, about 29,000 patent infringement lawsuits were filed in the U.S. district courts” and that the number of these lawsuits filed per year fluctuated only slightly until 2011 (GAO Report, p. 14).  The GAO Report also finds that in 2011 about 900 more lawsuits were filed than the average number of lawsuits in each of the four previous years, which an increase of about 31%, but it attributes this to the AIA’s prohibition on joinder of multiple defendants in a single patent infringement lawsuit that went into effect in 2011 (GAO Report, p. 14).  We also discussed the causal effect of the AIA joinder rules on the recent increase in patent litigation here and here.

The GAO Report next explores the correlation between the volume of patent infringement lawsuits filed and the litigants who brought those suits.  Utilizing the data obtained from Lex Machina, the GAO observed that from 2007 to 2011 manufacturing companies and related entities brought approximately 68% of all patent infringement lawsuits, while patent aggregating and licensing companies brought only 19% of such lawsuits. (The remaining 13% of lawsuits were brought by individual inventors, universities, and a number of entities the GAO was unable to verify.) The GAO Report acknowledged that lawsuits brought by patent licensing companies increased in 2011 (24%), but it found that this increase is not statistically significant. (GAO Report, pp. 17-18)

The GAO also found that the lawsuits filed by manufacturers and patent licensing companies settled or likely settled at similar rates (GAO Report, p. 25).  Again, this contradicts widely asserted claims today that patent licensing companies bring patent infringement lawsuits solely for purposes of only nuisance settlements (implying that manufacturers litigate patents to trial at a higher rate than patent licensing companies).

In sum, the GAO Report reveals that the conventional wisdom today about a so-called “patent troll litigation explosion” is unsupported by the facts (see also here and here).  Manufacturers – i.e., producers of products based upon patented innovation – bring the vast majority of patent infringement lawsuits, and that these lawsuits have similar characteristics as those brought by patent licensing companies.

The GAO Report shines an important spotlight on a fundamental flaw in the current policy debates about patent licensing companies (the so-called “NPEs” or “patent trolls”).  Commentators, scholars and congresspersons pushing for legislative revisions to patent litigation to address a so-called “patent troll problem” have relied on overheated rhetoric and purported “studies” that simply do not hold up to empirical scrutiny.  While mere repetition of unsupported and untenable claims makes such claims conventional wisdom (and thus “truth” in the minds of policymakers and the public), it is still no substitute for a sensible policy discussion based on empirically sound data. 

This is particularly important given that the outcry against patent licensing companies continues to sweep the popular media and is spurring Congress and the President to propose substantial legislative and regulatory revisions to the patent system.  With the future of innovation at stake, it is not crazy to ask that before we make radical, systemic changes to the patent system that we have validly established empirical evidence that such revisions are in fact necessary or at least would do more good than harm. The GAO Report reminds us all that we have not yet reached this minimum requirement for sound, sensible policymaking.

Filed under: intellectual property, litigation, patent Tagged: bessen, chien, GAO, Goodlatte Discussion Draft, hr 3309, innovation act, meurer, NPE, PAE, patent freedom, patent litigation, patent troll, report on patent litigation, rpx, statistics

Below is the text of my oral testimony to the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, the Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Insurance Subcommittee, at its November 7, 2013 hearing on “Demand Letters and Consumer Protection: Examining Deceptive Practices by Patent Assertion Entities.” Information on the hearing is here, including an archived webcast of the hearing. My much longer and more indepth written testimony is here.

Please note that I am incorrectly identified on the hearing website as speaking on behalf of the Center for the Protection of Intellectual Property (CPIP). In fact, I was invited to testify soley in my personal capacity as a Professor of Law at George Mason University School of Law, given my academic research into the history of the patent system and the role of licensing and commercialization in the distribution of patented innovation. I spoke for neither George Mason University nor CPIP, and thus I am solely responsible for the content of my research and remarks.

Chairman McCaskill, Ranking Member Heller, and Members of the Subcommittee:

Thank you for this opportunity to speak with you today.

There certainly are bad actors, deceptive demand letters, and frivolous litigation in the patent system. The important question, though, is whether there is a systemic problem requiring further systemic revisions to the patent system. There is no answer to this question, and this is the case for three reasons.

Harm to Innovation

First, the calls to rush to enact systemic revisions to the patent system are being made without established evidence there is in fact systemic harm to innovation, let alone any harm to the consumers that Section 5 authorizes the FTC to protect. As the Government Accountability Office found in its August 2013 report on patent litigation, the frequently-cited studies claiming harms are actually “nonrandom and nongeneralizable,” which means they are unscientific and unreliable.

These anecdotal reports and unreliable studies do not prove there is a systemic problem requiring a systemic revision to patent licensing practices.

Of even greater concern is that the many changes to the patent system Congress is considering, incl. extending the FTC’s authority over demand letters, would impose serious costs on real innovators and thus do actual harm to America’s innovation economy and job growth.

From Charles Goodyear and Thomas Edison in the nineteenth century to IBM and Microsoft today, patent licensing has been essential in bringing patented innovation to the marketplace, creating economic growth and a flourishing society.  But expanding FTC authority to regulate requests for licensing royalties under vague evidentiary and legal standards only weakens patents and create costly uncertainty.

This will hamper America’s innovation economy—causing reduced economic growth, lost jobs, and reduced standards of living for everyone, incl. the consumers the FTC is charged to protect.

Existing Tools

Second, the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) and courts have long had the legal tools to weed out bad patents and punish bad actors, and these tools were massively expanded just two years ago with the enactment of the America Invents Act.

This is important because the real concern with demand letters is that the underlying patents are invalid.

No one denies that owners of valid patents have the right to license their property or to sue infringers, or that patent owners can even make patent licensing their sole business model, as did Charles Goodyear and Elias Howe in the mid-nineteenth century.

There are too many of these tools to discuss in my brief remarks, but to name just a few: recipients of demand letters can sue patent owners in courts through declaratory judgment actions and invalidate bad patents. And the PTO now has four separate programs dedicated solely to weeding out bad patents.

For those who lack the knowledge or resources to access these legal tools, there are now numerous legal clinics, law firms and policy organizations that actively offer assistance.

Again, further systemic changes to the patent system are unwarranted because there are existing legal tools with established legal standards to address the bad actors and their bad patents.

If Congress enacts a law this year, then it should secure full funding for the PTO. Weakening patents and creating more uncertainties in the licensing process is not the solution.

Rhetoric

Lastly, Congress is being driven to revise the patent system on the basis of rhetoric and anecdote instead of objective evidence and reasoned explanations. While there are bad actors in the patent system, terms like PAE or patent troll constantly shift in meaning. These terms have been used to cover anyone who licenses patents, including universities, startups, companies that engage in R&D, and many others.

Classic American innovators in the nineteenth century like Thomas Edison, Charles Goodyear, and Elias Howe would be called PAEs or patent trolls today. In fact, they and other patent owners made royalty demands against thousands of end users.

Congress should exercise restraint when it is being asked to enact systemic legislative or regulatory changes on the basis of pejorative labels that would lead us to condemn or discriminate against classic innovators like Edison who have contributed immensely to America’s innovation economy.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the benefits or costs of patent licensing to the innovation economy is an important empirical and policy question, but systemic changes to the patent system should not be based on rhetoric, anecdotes, invalid studies, and incorrect claims about the historical and economic significance of patent licensing

As former PTO Director David Kappos stated last week in his testimony before the House Judiciary Committee: “we are reworking the greatest innovation engine the world has ever known, almost instantly after it has just been significantly overhauled. If there were ever a case where caution is called for, this is it.”

Thank you.

Filed under: antitrust, federal trade commission, intellectual property, licensing, litigation, patent, regulation, section 5 Tagged: antitrust, broken patent system, consumer, demand letters, ftc, legislation, licensing, mccaskill, mossoff, non practicing entity, PAE, patent assertion entity, patent reform, patent troll, podcasting patent, section 5, senate, wifi

Over at the Center for the Protection of Intellectual Property (CPIP), Mark Schultz has an important blog posting on the Mercatus Center‘s recent launch of its new copyright piracy website, piracydata.org.  The launch of this website has caused a bit of a tempest in a teapot with a positive report on it in the Washington Post and with a report in the Columbia Journalism Review pointing out problems in its data and errors in its claims.  (It is a bit ironic that a libertarian organization is having trouble with the launch of a website at the same time that there is similar reporting on troubles of the launch of another website on the opposite side of the political spectrum, Obamacare.)

Read the full piece here. 

The Center for the Protection of Intellectual Property is hosting a teleforum panel on end-user lawsuits in patent law on Thursday, August 29, at Noon (EST). Here’s the announcement with the program information:

End-User Lawsuits in Patent Litigation: A Bug or a Feature of Patent Law?
A Teleforum Panel
(Free and Open to the Public)

Thursday, August 29, 2013
Noon – 1pm (EST)

In the patent policy debates today, one issue that has proven a flash point of controversy is patent infringement lawsuits against consumers and retailers, such as coffee shops, JC Penney, and others.  These are now called “end-user lawsuits,” and various bills in Congress, including the Goodlatte Discussion Draft released last May, would mandate a “stay” of such lawsuits in favor of suing upstream manufacturers.  The federal judiciary currently vests stay decisions within the discretionary authority of trial judges, who have long controlled and directed complex litigation in their courtrooms.  While anecdotes of cease-and-desist letters against “mom-and-pop stores” abound in public commentary, there has been no discussion of the systemic effects of the proposed mandatory stay provisions.  Are end-user lawsuits a recent phenomenon or are they a longstanding feature of the patent system?  Why has approval of a motion to stay litigation rested within the discretionary authority of a trial judge?  Are there are any unintended consequences of adopting a mandatory stay rule for end-user lawsuits?  This teleforum panel brings together scholars and representatives from the innovation industries to discuss the history, function and policy implications of end-user lawsuits within patent litigation.

This is a live, in-person panel presentation in which the panelists and audience members participate via a conference bridge.  It is free and open to the public (audience members simply call the 800 number below).  Audience members will be able to ask questions of the panelists in an interactive Q&A format.  The teleforum panel also will be recorded and posted as a podcast.

PANELISTS:

Christopher Beauchamp, Assistant Professor of Law, Brooklyn Law School
David Berten, Founder and Partner, Global IP Law Group
John Scott, Vice President of Litigation, Qualcomm Inc.

Moderator: Adam Mossoff, Professor of Law and Co-Director of Academic Programs of the Center for the Protection of Intellectual Property, George Mason University School of Law

PROGRAM INFORMATION:

Thursday, August 29, 2013
Noon – 1pm (Eastern Standard Time)

CONFERENCE BRIDGE INFORMATION:

Telephone Number: (800) 832-0736
Access Code: 1346613

 

Filed under: intellectual property, litigation, patent Tagged: coffee shop, end user lawsuit, Goodlatte Discussion Draft, patent assertion entity, patent litigation, patent reform, patent troll, wifi

[Cross Posted to the Center for the Protection of Intellectual Property]

In its recent decision in Douglas Dynamics v. Buyers Products Co. (Fed. Cir., May 21, 2013), the Federal Circuit was forced to reverse a district court’s abuse of its discretion because the trial judge injected an anti-patent bias into the legal test for determining whether a patent-owner should receive a permanent injunction against an infringer. As highlighted in a blog posting, the Federal Circuit explained that district courts should not read the eBay four-factor test such that it eviscerates “the public’s general interest in the judicial protection of property rights in inventive technology” (to quote from the Douglas Dynamics opinion).

A scant two months later, the Federal Circuit again reversed another district court’s denial of an injunction and again had to explain why the equitable test for issuing injunctions should not be applied in a way that undermines the property rights secured in patented innovation.  In Aria Diagnostics, Inc. v. Sequenom, Inc. (Fed. Cir., Aug. 9, 2013), the Federal Circuit reversed a district court’s denial of the patent-owner’s request for a preliminary injunction, holding that the district court improperly balanced the multi-factor test governing issuance of preliminary injunctions. 

In Chief Judge Randall Rader’s opinion for a unanimous panel in Aria Diagnostics, the Federal Circuit criticized the district court’s denial of Sequenom’s request for a preliminary injunction against Aria Diagnostics.  In this case, Sequenom countersued Aria Diagnostics following Aria Diagnostics declaratory judgment lawsuit against it, alleging that Aria Diagnostics infringes its patented diagnostic test for identifying trisomy disorders (U.S. Patent No. 6,258,540).  Trisomy disorders are genetic disorders that can result in a range of complications during and after pregnancy—from death of a fetus to down syndrome in a newborn.  The evidence submitted to the district court established that Sequenom’s patented tests eliminated the need for risky amniocenteses and “presented fewer risks and a more dependable rate of abnormality detection.”

Following its countersuit for patent infringement, Sequenom requested a preliminary injunction and the district court denied its request.  In the proceedings below, as the Federal Circuit explained, the district court rejected Sequenom’s request for a preliminary injunction because it simple assumed that Sequenom would not suffer irreparable injury given that it would easily profit from its radically innovative test.  On the basis of this assumption, the district court concluded that “the erosion to Sequenom’s price and its loss of market share were not irreparable.”

The Federal Circuit pointedly identified the implicit anti-patent bias in the district court’s rarefied reasoning from such misguided and unproven assumptions:

While the facts may show that damages would be reparable, this assumption is not sufficient. In the face of that kind of universal assumption, patents would lose their character as an exclusive right as articulated by the Constitution and become at best a judicially imposed and monitored compulsory license. (original emphases)

In short, district courts should not read the multi-factor tests for injunctions so as to eviscerate the constitutional fact that a patent is a property right, and thus de facto convert a patent into merely a regulatory entitlement to a compulsory license. Property rights secure more than just a “reasonable” rate of profit as determined by either a court or a regulatory agency. As pointed out in Aria Diagnostics, the case law on injunctions have well established that “price erosion, loss of goodwill, damage to reputation, and loss of business opportunities are all valid grounds for finding irreparable harm,” which can and should justify an injunction (after these harms are appropriately balanced against the harms to the alleged infringer) to secure a property right in innovative technology.

The Federal Circuit further criticized the district court because, while finding that a preliminary injunction might put Aria Diagnostics out of business as a justification to deny Sequenom’s request for the injunction, the “district court made no findings on the harm that would accrue to Sequenom’s R&D and investment in the technology, undermining work and money spent developing, validating, and commercializing any covered product.”  The Federal Circuit emphasized that the balance of hardships in the legal test for issuing an injunction requires courts to not only assess harm to alleged infringers, but also to assess the harms to the patent-owner, such as “price erosion, loss of goodwill, damage to reputation, and loss of business opportunities.” 

In short, the district court failed to weigh the relevant harms to both the patent-owner and the alleged infringer, and instead the district court relied solely on the harm to the alleged infringer (Aria Diagnostics) as balanced against its pure conjecture of massive profits for Sequenom in some undetermined future. Thus, the district court denied Sequenom’s request for a preliminary injunction. But this was an entirely inappropriate application of the equitable inquiry required in issuing or denying a preliminary injunction.  In effect, the district court placed a large thumb on the judicial scale in favor of the alleged infringer in its equitable analysis—a violation of the fundamental principles of equity. For this reason, the Federal Circuit reversed and remanded the case back to the district court for it to make the appropriate fact findings under the appropriate application of the multi-factor test for issuing a preliminary injunction.

The significance of Aria Diagnostics is that the Federal Circuit continues to push back against the ongoing misinterpretation of the equitable tests for issuance of injunctions in patent infringement cases, whether by academics, federal officials or district courts.  In doing so, the court is providing some much-needed guidance to district courts in what facts they should consider in assessing the relevant harms to each party in issuing or denying an injunction.

 

Filed under: intellectual property, litigation, patent Tagged: aria diagnostics, EBay, equity, injunction, preliminary injunction, rader, sequenom, trisomy

[Cross posted at The Center for the Protection of Intellectual Property]

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. Between 1840 and 1849, for instance, patent litigation rates were 3.6% — more than twice the patent litigation rate today.

(As an aside, we have to hold constant for issued patents in computing litigation percentage rates because more patents are issued now per year than twice the total population of New York City (NYC) in 1820 — 253,315 patents issued in 2012 compared to 123,706 residents in NYC in 1820.  Yet before someone says that this just means we have too many patents today, as Judge Posner blithely asserts without any empirical evidence, one must also recognize that the NYC population in 2013 is 8.3 million, which is far beyond merely double its 1820 population — NYC’s population has grown by a factor of 67!  A simple comparison to population growth, especially taking into account the explosive growth in the innovation industries in the past several decades, could as easily justify the claim that we haven’t got enough patents issuing today.)

Unfortunately, the mythical claims about a “patent litigation explosion” have shifted in recent months (perhaps because the original assertion was untenable).  Now the assertion is that there has been an “explosion” in lawsuits brought by patent licensing companies.  I’ll note for the record here that patent licensing companies are often referred to today by the undefined and nonobjective rhetorical epithet of “patent troll.”  In a recent study of patent licensing companies that exposes many of the unsound and unproven claims about these much-maligned companies – such as that patents owned by these companies are of lower quality than those owned by manufacturing entities – Stephen Moore first explained that the “troll” slur is used today by academics, commentators and the public alike “without a universally accepted definition.” So, let’s dispense with nonobjective rhetoric and simply identify these companies factually by their business models: patent licensing.

As with all discriminatory slurs, it’s unsurprising that this new claim about an alleged “explosion” in so-called “patent troll” lawsuits is unproven rubbish.  Similar to the myth about patent litigation generally, this is just another example of overwrought and empirically unsound rhetoric being used to push a policy agenda in Congress and regulatory agencies. (Six bills have been on the Hill so far this year, and FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez has announced that the FTC intends to begin a formal § 6(b) investigation of patent licensing companies).

How do we know that patent licensing companies are not the sole driver of any increases in patent litigation?  Contrary to the much-hyped claim today that patent licensing companies are the primary cause of most patent lawsuits in district courts in 2012, other serious and more careful reviews of the litigation data have shown that the primary culprit is not patent licensing companies, but rather the America Invents Act of 2011(“AIA”). The AIA created numerous new administrative proceedings for invalidating patents at the Patent & Trademark Office, which created additional incentives to file lawsuits in certain contexts.  Moreover, the AIA expressly prohibited joinder of multiple defendants in single lawsuits.  Both of these significant changes to the patent system has produced the entirely logical and expected result of more lawsuits being filed after the AIA’s statutory provisions went into effect in 2011 and 2012. In basic statistics terms, the effect of these statutory provisions in any study of patent litigation rates that does not take them into account is referred to as a “confounding variable.”

Even more important, when the data used in one of the most-referenced studies asserting a patent litigation explosion by patent licensing companies was tested by a highly respected scholar who specializes in statistical and empirical analyses of the patent system, he reported that he found no statistically significant results. (See Dave Schwartz’s testimony at the DOJ-FTC Workshop (Dec. 10, 2012), starting at approximately 1:58 at this video. Transcript available here.)  At least the scholars of this disputed study made their data available for confirmation, according to basic scientific norms. Other prominently cited studies on patent licensing companies have relied on secret data from companies like RPX, Patent Freedom, and other firms who have a very large dog in the litigation and policy fight, and thus this data has all of the trappings of being unreliable and biased (see here and here)

The important role that the AIA is playing in increasing patent lawsuits by patent licensing companies is ironic if only because the people misreporting the patent litigation data are the same people who were big proponents of the AIA (some of them even attended the AIA’s signing ceremony with President Obama in September 2011).  Among non-patent scholars, this is called trying to have your cake and eat it, too.  Usually such efforts fail, especially when children always try to get away with this logical fallacy.  It shows the depths to which the patent policy debates have sunk that the press, Congress, the President and many others don’t seem to care about this one bit and instead are pushing ahead and repeating – and even drafting legislation based upon – bad “statistics” with serious methodological problems and compiled from secret, unreliable data.

With Congress rushing headlong to enact legislation that discriminates against patent licensing companies, it’s time to step back and start asking serious questions before the legal system that makes possible the innovation industries is changed and we discover too late that it’s for the worse.  It’s time to set aside rhetoric and made-up “statistics” based on secret data and to ask whether there really is a systemic problem.  It’s also time to start asking serious questions about why these myths were created in the first place, what does the raw data actually say, who is providing the data and funding these “troll” studies, and who is pushing this rhetoric into the public policy debates to the point that it has become a deafening roar that makes impossible all reasonable and sensible discussion.

[NOTE: minor grammatical and style changes were made after the initial posting]

Filed under: antitrust, federal trade commission, intellectual property, litigation, patent Tagged: ftc, non practicing entity, patent assertion entity, patent litigation, patent litigation explosion, patent troll, section 6(b)

Over at the blog for the Center for the Protection of Intellectual Property, Richard Epstein has posted a lengthy essay that critiques the Obama Administration’s decision this past August 3 to veto the exclusion order issued by the International Trade Commission (ITC) in the Samsung v. Apple dispute filed there (ITC Investigation No. 794).  In his essay, The Dangerous Adventurism of the United States Trade Representative: Lifting the Ban against Apple Products Unnecessarily Opens a Can of Worms in Patent Law, Epstein rightly identifies how the 3-page letter issued to the ITC creates tremendous institutional and legal troubles in the name an unverified theory about “patent holdup” invoked in the name of an equally overgeneralized and vague belief in the “public interest.”

Here’s a taste:

The choice in question here thus boils down to whether the low rate of voluntary failure justifies the introduction of an expensive and error-filled judicial process that gives all parties the incentive to posture before a public agency that has more business than it can possibly handle. It is on this matter critical to remember that all standards issues are not the same as this particularly nasty, high-stake dispute between two behemoths whose vital interests make this a highly atypical standard-setting dispute. Yet at no point in the Trade Representative’s report is there any mention of how this mega-dispute might be an outlier. Indeed, without so much as a single reference to its own limited institutional role, the decision uses a short three-page document to set out a dogmatic position on issues on which there is, as I have argued elsewhere, good reason to be suspicious of the overwrought claims of the White House on a point that is, to say the least, fraught with political intrigue

Ironically, there was, moreover a way to write this opinion that could have narrowed the dispute and exposed for public deliberation a point that does require serious consideration. The thoughtful dissenting opinion of Commissioner Pinkert pointed the way. Commissioner Pinkert contended that the key factor weighing against granting Samsung an exclusion order is that Samsung in its FRAND negotiations demanded from Apple rights to use certain non standard-essential patents as part of the overall deal. In this view, the introduction of nonprice terms on nonstandard patterns represents an abuse of the FRAND standard. Assume for the moment that this contention is indeed correct, and the magnitude of the problem is cut a hundred or a thousand fold. This particular objection is easy to police and companies will know that they cannot introduce collateral matters into their negotiations over standards, at which point the massive and pointless overkill of the Trade Representative’s order is largely eliminated. No longer do we have to treat as gospel truth the highly dubious assertions about the behavior of key parties to standard-setting disputes.

But is Pinkert correct? On the one side, it is possible to invoke a monopoly leverage theory similar to that used in some tie-in cases to block this extension. But those theories are themselves tricky to apply, and the counter argument could well be that the addition of new terms expands the bargaining space and thus increases the likelihood of an agreement. To answer that question to my mind requires some close attention to the actual and customary dynamics of these negotiations, which could easily vary across different standards. I would want to reserve judgment on a question this complex, and I think that the Trade Representative would have done everyone a great service if he had addressed the hard question. But what we have instead is a grand political overgeneralization that reflects a simple-minded and erroneous view of current practices.

You can read the essay at CPIP’s blog here, or you can download a PDF of the white paper version here (please feel free to distribute digitally or in hardcopy).

 

Filed under: administrative, intellectual property, international trade, litigation, patent, politics Tagged: Apple, exclusion order, international trade commission, International Trade Commission, Obama Administration, patent holdup, policy, Policy Statement, public interest, Richard Epstein, Samsung, united states trade representative, veto

Over at the blog for the Center for the Protection of Intellectual Property, I posted a short essay discussing the Federal Circuit’s recent decision in Douglas Dynamics v. Buyers Products (Fed. Cir. May 21, 2013).  Here’s a small taste:

The Federal Circuit’s recent decision in Douglas Dynamics, LLC, v. Buyers Products Co. (Fed. Cir. May 21, 2013) is very important given the widespread, albeit mistaken, belief today that the Supreme Court’s decision in eBay v. MercExchange (2005) established that damages and not injunctions are the presumptive remedy for patent infringement. ….

On appeal, Chief Judge Randall Rader resoundingly disagreed with Judge Conley’s belief that the “public interest” is always better served by the introduction of a new competitor who is selling cheaper products.  This is what happened in this case, as Douglas Dynamics and Buyers Products Company are competitors in the sale of snowplow blades.  Instead, Chief Judge Rader recognized that its act of infringement as such is what gave Buyers Products Company its market advantage in undercutting Douglas Dynamics’ prices.  Because it did not have to incur Douglas Dynamics’ ex ante expenses in engaging in innovative research and development, Buyers Products Company’s infringement permitted it the economic advantage of being able to undercut Douglas Dynamics prices’ and thus enter the allegedly “untapped market segment” of cheaper snowplow blades. It was precisely this expansion of a consumer market that the district court relied on in its denial of Douglas Dynamics’ requested injunction. In sum, the district court used an infringement-created expansion of the market to justify denying an injunction and awarding a compulsory license to the patent-owner, which effectively rewarded Buyer Products Company for its act of infringement.

In reversing the district court’s award of a reasonable royalty, Chief Judge Rader explained the basic economic principle of dynamic efficiency that animates the Patent Act in securing property rights to inventors in their patented innovation ….

As bloggers are wont to say, go read the whole thing.

Filed under: intellectual property, patent Tagged: Chief Judge Randall Rader, compulsory license, douglas dynamics, EBay, Patent, patent enforcement, Patent infringement, patent litigation, reasonable royalty