Posts Tagged: "Steve Moore"

How we deal with the problems uncovered herein is something for deliberate consideration, not the activity of an automaton. For example, this paper demonstrates that patents asserted by inventors and inventor based companies generally do not fare as well as patents of other entities. However, in the United States none of us would want to stop all such entities from trying to market and license their ideas. Most of us would agree that the independent inventor has been the heart of innovation in the United States for a very long time. We have too many memories of the stories of the Wright Brothers, Chester Carlton of Xerox fame, of Eli Whitney and the cotton gin, of Edison, and of Farnsworth — the farmer boy who invented the television.

As can be seen from Fig. 12, 25% of the cases brought against the retailer were actually brought by Producer companies. The other 75% of cases could indeed be classified as NPE suits. However, of these suits, 30% were by independent inventor or independent inventor related companies, and the other 45% of cases were brought by other NPEs. Interestingly of the “other NPEs”, we found all of the patents asserted against this retailer were patents originally obtained from Producers. Of these patents, one-third came from big corporate America and the remaining two-thirds from smaller Producing companies. That means nearly 65% of this retailers troubles, which it directly attributes to “trolls” asserting bad patents, are actually related to patents that derived from Producing companies. Of its cases that was resolved, pacer suggests none were tried and each was mutually dismissed within 4 months to 13 months.

Myth 4: Patents of NPEs fare much more poorly in reexamination proceedings brought during litigation than those of Producers. Truth: When one includes independent inventors and independent inventors in the mix of NPEs, the patents being asserted by NPEs may be said to fare slightly more poorly in reexamination proceedings than those patents asserted by Producers. However, if one removes these independent inventor entities from the mix of NPEs, the patents held by non-independent inventor based NPEs were seen to do at least as well, if not better, than the average asserted patent of the Producers which was likewise thrown into reexamination during litigation.

There are many myths that are attached to the fable of the so-called “patent troll.” Acting like the MythBusters, we probed some of them. For example, the success rate of NPEs overall across 267 random cases indicates that the litigation outcome for NPE suits looks very similar to litigation outcome for Producer suits. However, when individual inventor suits and individual inventor company suits were removed from the mix of overall NPEs, we found that non-independent inventor NPEs had an outcome profile that looked significantly better than the Producers, both in very likely favorable and likely unfavorable outcomes in litigation.