Posts Tagged: "Michael Meurer"

In their submission to the Washington Post’s series this week on so-called “patent reform” and “patent trolls,” James Bessen and Michael Meurer repeat the same junk science claims we’ve all heard many times before. This narrative is the unfortunate byproduct of unreliable and unscientific studies. This past March, I joined forty economists and law professors in a letter to Congress expressing “deep concerns with the many flawed, unreliable, or incomplete studies about the American patent system” that have been injected into the patent policy debate. Unfortunately, Bessen and Meurer themselves have produced some of this junk science, infected with mistakes that render their conclusions utterly meaningless. For example, they once estimated that litigation by so-called “patent trolls” cost the U.S. economy $29 billion in 2011. This figure has been thoroughly debunked and criticized for the fundamental and methodological flaws, such as using proprietary, secret data collected by a company that has a stake in lobbying for more legislative revisions to patent litigation rules.