The Uneasy Case for Ariosa Diagnostics v. Illumina

The Supreme Court's request for views from the Solicitor General in Ariosa Diagnostics v. Illumina has renewed interest in this nerdy issue of patent prior art. I appear to be in a very small minority that believes that Federal Circuit's rule on this may be right (or at least is not obviously wrong), so I thought I would discuss the issue.

Let's start with the (pre-AIA) statute. 35 U.S.C. 102(e) says that one type of prior art may be where:

the invention was described in ... a patent granted on an application for patent by another filed in the United States before the invention by the applicant for patent...

This is a pretty old rule, dating back to the Alexander Milburn case. The gist of the rule is that delays in the patent office should not deprive references of being prior art. Thus, even though the patent application is "secret" until published, we backdate the reference to the date of filing once the patent is granted (or the application published, which is covered in a subsection I do not reproduce above).

The issue in Ariosa v. Illumina is what to do with provisional patent applications. For the reference at issue, the prior art patent first relied on a provisional patent application, which is never published but becomes publicly available if a patent that relies on it is granted. Later, a regular patent application was filed and eventually issued. There is a dispute about whether the invention was even described in the provisional, but we'll assume that it was. However, the PTAB ruled (and the Fed. Cir. affirmed) that because the issued patent claims were not supported by the provisional patent disclosure, then the reference could not be backdated to the filing of the provisional patent, even if the invention was described in the final patent.

This is where the objections come in. If the patent relies on the filing date of the provisional patent (and incorporates it by reference), then surely it is described as of the provisional patent date and should be prior art. We are, after all, living in a first to invent world and it is unfair that the first inventor (in the provisional patent) should not count as prior art.

Let's start with Alexander Milburn. I love that case. I have assigned it to my students. I think it explains this statute well. But it is not controlling. It was an interpretation of the statute at that time. We have a later adopted statute that defines what is and is not prior art, and Alexander Milburn does not speak to the facts of the Ariosa dispute because there were no provisional patents at that time. This is not like, say, on sale (Section 102(b)) in Helsinn in which that statute remained unchanged and the meaning of the words remained unchanged. There were no provisional patents when Alexander Milburn was granted, and thus it has little to say; the statute was intended to deal with that (and even that has a difficult time).

As a corollary to this analysis, I want to put the rest that there is a problem with the Federal Circuit's rule because it rewards the second inventor. I would bet dollars to donuts that many people arguing this scoffed at complaints that the AIA's first to file rule was unconstitutional because it rewarded second inventors. Both arguments fail for the same reason - the patent system has a long history of allowing the second invention to issue as a patent under certain circumstances. Indeed, even the current version of 102(e) disallows many early foreign patent filings, even though such filings are clearly the first invention. Once again, we have to look at the statute.

So, let's look at the statute: "The invention is described in" - critics focus on this, saying it makes no sense to look at a patent's claims. We only care about whether the invention was described. Fair enough - I agree.

But what about the next part: "a patent granted on an application for patent by another filed in the United States before the invention." Looking at this in pieces, we see a few requirements. First, the description must be in the patent, not the provisional application. Thus, looking at what the provisional patent says should be irrelevant...for this piece.

Second, that description must be in a patent "granted on an application for patent...filed...before." This is where the action is. What does it mean for a patent to be granted on an application for patent filed? For a provisional application, means that the patent must satisfy Section 119(e). It must be filed within one year, and the final patent claim must be supported by the written description of the provisional patent. It is as simple as that - the plain words of the statute dictate the Federal Circuit's rule.

There is a policy benefit to this reading. I think that patentee's can take advantage of the jump from provisional to final patent disclosures, adding new matter while always claiming priority back to the provisional. The provisional patent is not easily obtained, and it takes work to parse out which claims are actually entitled to the earlier filing date. Enforcing the rules on prior art better incentivizes complete provisional patent disclosures.

Then why do I say this is an uneasy case? Well, did I mention that I like Alexander Milburn? The policy it states, that delay in the patent office shouldn't affect prior art can easily be applied here. So long as the description is in the provisional patent, and so long as that provisional patent is eventually publicly accessible, then the goal, even if not the strict language, of the statute is met.

Also, my reading leads to a potentially unhappy result. A party could file a provisional that supports invention A, and then a year later file a patent that claims invention A but describes invention B. The patent could then be asserted against B while relying on the earlier filing date of A, even though B was never described in the provisional as of the earlier date. Similarly, a provisional patent could describe B, and B could then be removed from the final patent application, and the patent would not be prior art because B was not described in the patent, even though B had been described in the earlier, now publicly accessible provisional application.

I don't know where I land on this - as readers of this blog know, I tend to be a textualist. Sometimes the Court has agreed with that, but sometimes (see patentable subject matter and patent venue) it does not.

Patents and the Administrative State

When Justice Gorsuch was confirmed to the Supreme Court, many commentators, well, commented that he was wary of administrative overreach. But it turns out he was really active in patent cases, writing opinions in all the patent cases he saw last term. Who knew he was so interested in patents? He does have some IP chops; his opinion in Meshworks remains one of my favorite copyright cases, not the least of which because it validates a legal argument I made about virtual reality copyright some 25 years ago. I was able to cite that case in a recent book chapter on the same subject.

But it turns out that his interest in patents may be one and the same as his concern about the administrative state. We suspected as much with Oil States, but what about the others? To answer this, Daniel Kim and Jonathan Stroud (both of Unified Patents) have an article forthcoming in the Chicago-Kent Journal of Intellectual Property called Administrative Oversight: Justice Gorsuch’s Patent Opinions, the PTAB, and Antagonism Toward the Administrative State. A draft is posted on SSRN, and the abstract is here:

In his first term, Justice Neil Gorsuch has made a surprisingly forceful impact on, of all things, patent law—and even more unlikely, the United States Patent and Trademark Office’s adjudicatory arm, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board. Was there any way to predict, from his 10th Circuit opinions below, that he would author opinions in all three patent cases in his first term? Was this attention the result of deeply submerged but long-felt opinions on patent law, or rather a result of his sharp distrust of administrative overreach? We analyze 10th Circuit and Supreme Court opinions authored by Justice Gorsuch, and conclude his unforeseen interest springs from his desire to limit agency power rather than from any particular concern with patents. Still, his opinions—intentionally or by happenstance—will reverberate through our patent law for years.

This article is straightforward and illuminating. It begins with the justice's background and some comments on his writing style. It then examines his Tenth Circuit opinions in IP and tribal immunity (there are really not that many, which the authors attribute to the backwater location of the 10th Circuit devoid of any innovation, which I'm sure the folks in Denver will be happy to hear).

What's interesting about the article is that its analysis of the cases is not about IP outcomes, but about methods and the administrative state. Returning to Meshwerks, for example, the authors focus primarily on how it traces the history and purpose of IP rather than the important holding that realistic renditions of physical objects lack creativity.

This analysis bears fruit, though, because they show how these same methods and concerns about the administrative state drive Gorsuch's patent opinions, including those where he is dissenting or breaking from other conservative justices.

I found this article an interesting and insightful read, and I thought it was especially well done given the authors' own admission that they do not agree with Justice Gorsuch's judicial perspective. In other words, this wasn't a fan piece, but instead really useful commentary about how judicial philosophy and concerns about the administrative state may be brought to bear on the IP system in unexpected ways.

What do Generic Drug Patent Settlements Say about Patent Quality?

An interesting study about Orange Book patents challenged both under Hatch-Waxman and Inter Partes Review caught my eye this week, but perhaps not for the ordinary reasons. One of the hot topics in drug patent challenges today is reverse payments: when the patentee pays the generic to stop a challenge. The Supreme Court has ruled that these payments can constitute antitrust violations. Though the drug companies give reasons, I'll admit that I've always been skeptical of these types of payments.

One of the key questions is whether the patent was going to survive. Most seem to assume that if a company pays to settle, then the patent was likely going to be invalidated. That's where the draft, Maintaining the Balance: An Empirical Study on Inter Partes Review Outcomes of Orange Book-Listed Drug Patents and its Effect on Hatch-Waxman Litigation, by Tulip Mahaseth (a recent Northwestern Law grad) comes in. Here is the abstract from SSRN:

The Hatch-Waxman Act intended to strike a delicate balance between encouraging pioneer drug innovation and promoting market entry of affordable generic versions of pioneer drugs by providing a streamlined pathway to challenge validity of Orange Book patents in federal district courts. In 2012, the America Invents Act introduced Inter Partes Review (IPR) proceedings which provide a faster, cheaper pathway to challenge Orange Book patents than Hatch-Waxman district court litigation. IPRs also have a lower evidentiary burden of proof and broader claim construction standard, which should make it easier, in theory, to obtain patent invalidation in IPRs as compared to Hatch-Waxman litigation. This empirical study on IPR outcomes of Orange Book patents in the past six years shows that both generic manufacturers and patent owners obtain more favorable final decisions in IPRs as compared to their Hatch-Waxman litigation outcomes because the rate of settlement in IPRs is much lower than in Hatch-Waxman litigation. Moreover, generic manufacturers do not appear to be targeting Orange Book patents in IPRs during their drug exclusivity period. Only 2 out of more than 400 IPRs against Orange Book patents were filed by generic petitioners during the patents’ New Chemical Entity exclusivity period. About 90% of the 230 Orange Book patents challenged in IPR proceedings were also challenged in Hatch-Waxman litigation. It is likely that generic manufacturers are not deterred from Hatch-Waxman litigation because of the lucrative 180-day exclusivity period, which gives the first generic filer 180 days to exclusively market their generic version without competition from other generics when the Orange Book drug patent is successfully invalidated in a subsequent district court proceeding. Therefore, IPR proceedings do not appear to be disrupting the delicate balance sought by the Hatch-Waxman Act. Instead, the IPR process has provided generic manufacturers a dual track option for challenging Orange Book patents by initiating Hatch-Waxman litigation in district courts and also pursuing patent invalidity in IPRs before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board, which has reduced rate of settlements resulting in more patents being upheld and invalidated.

There's a lot of great data in this paper, comparing Orange Book IPRs with non-Orange Book IPRs, including comparison of win rates and settlement rates.

But I want to focus on one seemingly minor point: as the number of IPRs has increased, the rate of settlement has decreased. And, more important, the decreasing rate of settlement has led to more invalidation and more affirmance of patents.

This result gives a nice window into how we might view settlements. Traditional Priest-Klein analysis says that this is exactly what we should see - that the previously settled cases were 50/50. But proving this is harder, and this data set would allow for a nice differences-in-differences analysis in future work.

Additionally, a split among outcomes implies that the settlements were not necessarily because the patentee believed the patent was at risk.  If anti-competitive settlements were ruling the day, I would have predicted that most of the (recent) non-settlements would have resulted in patent invalidation. Then again, it is possible that a 50% chance was risky enough to merit a reverse payment settlement in the past. Regardless of how one comes out on this issue, this study provides some helpful details for the argument.

Which Patents Get Instituted During Inter Partes Review?

I recently attended PatCon 8 at the University of San Diego Law School. It was a great event, with lots of interesting papers. One paper I enjoyed from one of the (many) empirical sessions was Determinants of Patent Quality: Evidence from Inter Partes Review Proceedings by Brian Love (Santa Clara), Shawn Miller (Stanford), and Shawn Ambwani (Unified Patents). The paper is on SSRN and the abstract is here:

We study the determinants of patent “quality”—the likelihood that an issued patent can survive a post-grant validity challenge. We do so by taking advantage of two recent developments in the U.S. patent system. First, rather than relying on the relatively small and highly-selected set of patents scrutinized by courts, we study instead the larger and broader set of patents that have been subjected to inter partes review, a recently established administrative procedure for challenging the validity of issued patents. Second, in addition to characteristics observable on the face of challenged patents, we utilize datasets recently made available by the USPTO to gather detailed information about the prosecution and examination of studied patents. We find a significant relationship between validity and a number of characteristics of a patent and its owner, prosecutor, examiner, and prosecution history. For example, patents prosecuted by large law firms, pharmaceutical patents, and patents with more words per claim are significantly more likely to survive inter partes review. On the other hand, patents obtained by small entities, patents assigned to examiners with higher allowance rates, patents with more U.S. patent classes, and patents with higher reverse citation counts are less likely to survive review. Our results reveal a number of strategies that may help applicants, patent prosecutors, and USPTO management increase the quality of issued patents. Our findings also suggest that inter partes review is, as Congress intended, eliminating patents that appear to be of relatively low quality.

 The study does a good job of identifying a variety of variables that do (and do not) correlate with whether the PTO institutes a review of patents. Some examples of interesting findings:

• Pharma patents are less likely to be instituted
• Solo/small firm prosecuted patents are more likely to be instituted
• Patents with more words in claim 1 (i.e. narrower patents) are less likely to be instituted
• Patents with more backward citations are more likely to be instituted (this is counterintuitive, but consistent with my own study of the patent litigation)
• Patent examiner characteristics affect likelihood of institution

There's a lot of good data here, and the authors did a lot of useful work to gather information that's not simply on the face of the patent. The paper is worth a good read. My primary criticism is the one I voiced during the session at PatCon - there's something about framing this as a generalized patent quality study that rankles me. (Warning, cranky old middle-age rambling ahead) I get that whether a patent is valid or not is an important quality indicator, and I've made similar claims. I just think the authors have to spend a lot of time/space (it's an 84 page paper) trying to support their claim.

For example, they argue that IPRs are more complete compared to litigation, because litigation has selection effects both in what gets litigated and in settlement post-litigation. But IPRs suffer from the same problem. Notwithstanding some differences, there's a high degree of matching between IPRs and litigation, and many petitions settle both before and after institution.

Which leads to a second point: these are institutions - not final determinations. Now, they treat institutions patents where the claims are upheld as non-instituted, but with 40% of the cases still pending (and a declining institution rate as time goes on) we don't know how the incomplete and settled institutions look. More controversially, they count as low quality any patent where any single claim is instituted.  So, you could challenge 100 claims, have one instituted, and the patent falls into the "bad" pile.

Now, they present data that shows it is not quite so bad as this, but the point remains: with high settlements and partial invalidation, it's hard work to make a general claim about patent quality. To be fair, the authors point out all of these limitations in their draft. It is not as though they aren't aware of the criticism, and that's a good thing. I suppose, then, it's just a style difference. Regardless, this paper is worth checking out.

Tribal Sovereign Immunity and Patent Law, Part II: Lessons in Shoddy Reasoning from the PTAB

Guest post by Professor Greg Ablavsky, Stanford Law School

Per Lisa's request, I have returned to offer some thoughts on the PTAB's tribal sovereign immunity decision (you can find my earlier post here and some additional musings coauthored with Lisa here). I had thought I had retired my role of masquerading as an (entirely unqualified) intellectual property lawyer, but, as the PTAB judges clearly haven't relinquished their pretensions to be experts in federal Indian law, here we are.

The upshot is that I find the PTAB's decision highly unpersuasive, for the reasons that follow, and I hope to convince you that, however you feel about the result, the PTAB's purported rationales should give pause. I should stress at the outset that I have no expertise to assess the PTAB's conclusion that Allergan is the "true owner" of the patent, which may well be correct. But the fact that this conclusion could have served as entirely independent basis for the judgment makes the slipshod reasoning in the first part of the decision on tribal immunity all the more egregious. Here are some examples—I hope you'll forgive the dive into Indian law and immunity doctrine:

1. Supreme Court Precedent: The tenor of the PTAB's decision is clear from its quotation of isolated dicta from Kiowa, where, in the process of considering off-reservation tribal sovereign immunity, the Supreme Court expressed some sympathy for the viewpoint of the dissenting Justices: "There are reasons to doubt the wisdom of perpetuating the [tribal immunity] doctrine." But the PTAB omits the key language that came at the end of the Court's discussion of this issue: "[W]e defer to the role Congress may wish to exercise in this important judgment," leaving the decision as to whether to abrogate tribal sovereign immunity—which Congress may do under its "plenary power"—to the legislature. In short, although you wouldn't know it from the PTAB's cherry-picked quotations, Kiowa actually determined that the right approach in the face of uncertainty was to uphold the doctrine of tribal sovereign immunity.

Nor was the 20-year-old Kiowa case the last word on this question. Astonishingly, the PTAB's decision never discusses the facts, holding, or reasoning of Bay Mills, even though the Court decided the case, unquestionably its most important recent statement on tribal sovereign immunity, in 2014. There, the Court rejected another effort to invalidate tribal sovereign immunity, stating that "it is fundamentally Congress's job, not ours, to determine whether or how to limit tribal immunity." This rule, the Court held, applied even more forcefully after Congress had had twenty years to revisit the holding in Kiowa and declined to eliminate tribal sovereign immunity. Id.

Arguably, the PTAB should give at least equal deference to congressional determinations as the Supreme Court, especially given the existence of pending legislation abrogating tribal immunity in this context. Or, setting the bar even lower, one would hope that the PTAB would at some point grapple with recent Supreme Court decisions directly on point. But they don't—in part because, as I'll discuss now, they mischaracterize the question as one of first impression.

Repealing Patents, Oil States, and IPRs

If you haven't read any of Chris Beauchamp's (Brooklyn Law) work on patent law and litigation history, you really should. His book, Invented by Law, on the history of Bell telephone litigation, and his Yale L.J. article on the First Patent Litigation Explosion (in the 1800's) are both engaging, thorough, and thoughtful looks at history. Furthermore, he writes as a true historian, placing his work in context even if there is no clear answer for today's disputes. He points to where we can draw lessons and where we might be too quick to draw lessons. Chris doesn't publish that often because he does so much work toiling over source materials in the national archives and elsewhere.

Prof. Beauchamp posted a new essay to SSRN last week that caught my eye, and I thought I would share it here. Repealing Patents could not be more timely given the pending Oil States case - it discusses how patent revocation worked at our nation's founding, both in England and the U.S.  Here is the abstract:

The first known patent case in the United States courts did not enforce a patent. Instead, it sought to repeal one. The practice of cancelling granted patent rights has appeared in various forms over the past two and a quarter centuries, from the earliest U.S. patent law in 1790 to the new regime of inter partes review (“IPR”) and post grant review. With the Supreme Court’s grant of cert in Oil States Energy Services v. Greene’s Energy Group and its pending review of the constitutionality of IPR, this history has taken on a new significance.

This essay uses new archival sources to uncover the history of patent cancellation during the first half-century of American patent law. These sources suggest that the early statutory provisions for repealing patents were more widely used and more broadly construed than has hitherto been realized. They also show that some U.S. courts in the early Republic repealed patents in a summary process without a jury, until the Supreme Court halted the practice. Each of these findings has implications—though not straightforward answers—for the questions currently before the Supreme Court.

As with his other work, this essay is careful not to draw too many conclusions. It cannot answer all of our questions, and he explains why.

There were a few key points that really stood out for me; things we should be thinking about when we think about the "common law" right to a jury with respect to the Seventh Amendment, and more broadly how we think of revocation of patents as public.

First, the essay points out that the first Patent Act (with repeal included) predated the bill of rights. So when we think of common law, we usually look to England because the U.S. adopted English law at the time of the Seventh Amendment. But, here, the U.S. broke with England and installed its own procedure. It is quite possible that English practice at the time is simply irrelevant. I don't know how this cuts for the case, frankly.

Second, the revocation action came at a time when patents were essentially registered rather than examined. Beauchamp points out that the first three years had three cabinet members using discretion to grant patents, but they were not conducting prior art searches and the like. In other words, revocation, which was abolished when the patent examination system was installed in 1836, was a creature of non-examination, not a way to do re-examination.

Third, there were some summary revocations, but there was a dispute about whether a jury should decide factual issues on revocation. That debate lasted until 1924, when Justice Story (for the Supreme Court) ruled that the English procedure of a jury trial should apply. This, too, is ambiguous, because the right to a jury trial was really up in the air for a while. But what struck me most about this history is something different. As I wrote in my own article America's First Patents, Justice Story had an affinity for English patent law, and apparently liked to discard American breaks from the law in favor of English rule. In my article, it was his importation of a distrust of process patents (which gave rise to much of our patentable subject matter jurisprudence today). In this essay, it is his importation of the English revocation process, which required a jury. If it turns out that jury rule in early American repeal proceedings is important in this case, you'll know who to thank.

Cuozzo v. Lee and the Potential for Patent Law Deference Mistakes

I wrote a short post on Monday's decision in Cuozzo v. Lee for Stanford's Legal Aggregate blog, which I'm reposting here. My co-blogger Michael Risch has already posted his initial reactions to the opinion on Monday, and he also wrote about deference mistakes in the context of the "broadest reasonable interpretation" standard in an earlier article, The Failure of Public Notice in Patent Prosecution.

The Federal Circuit's patent law losing streak was broken Monday with the Supreme Court's decision in Cuozzo v. Lee. At issue were two provisions of the 2011 America Invents Act related to the new "inter partes review" (IPR) procedure for challenging granted patents before the Patent and Trademark Office. IPR proceedings have been melodramatically termed "death squads" for patents—only 14% of patents that have been through completed trials have emerged unscathed—but the Supreme Court dashed patent owners' hopes by upholding the status quo. Patent commentators are divided on whether the ease of invalidating patents through IPR spurs or hinders innovation, but I have a more subtle concern: the Supreme Court's affirmance means that the PTO and the courts will evaluate the validity of granted patents under different standards of review and different interpretive rules, providing ample possibilities for what Prof. Jonathan Masur and I have termed "deference mistakes" if decisionmakers aren't careful about distinguishing them.

Cuozzo: So Right, Yet So Wrong

The Supreme Court issued its basically unanimous opinion in Cuozzo today. I won't give a lot of background here; anyone taking the time to read this likely understands the issues. The gist of the ruling is this: USPTO institution decisions in inter partes review (IPR) are unappealable, and the PTO can set the claim construction rules for IPR's, and thus the current broadest reasonable construction rule will surely remain unchanged.

I have just a few thoughts on the ruling, which I'll discuss here briefly.

First, the unappealability ruling seems right to me. That is, what part of "final and non-appealable" do we not understand? Of course, this leads to a partial dissent, that it means no interlocutory appeals, but you can appeal upon a final disposition. But that's just a statutory interpretation difference in my book. I'm not a general admin law expert, but the core of the reading, that Congress can give the right to institute a proceeding and make it unreviewable, so long as the outcome of the proceeding is reviewable, seems well within the range of rationality here.

But, even so, the ruling is unpalatable based on what I know about some of the decisions that have been made by the PTO. (Side note, my student won the NYIPLA writing competition based on a paper discussing this issue.) The court dismisses patentee's complaint that the PTO might institute on claims that weren't even petitioned for review as simply quibbling with the particularity of the petition and not raising any constitutional issue. This is troublesome, and it sure doesn't ring true in light of Twiqbal.

Second, the broadest reasonable construction ruling seems entirely, well, broadly reasonable. The PTO uses that method already in assessing claims, and it has wide discretion in the procedures it uses to determine patentability. Of course the PTO can do this.

But, still, it's so wrong. The Court understates, I believe, the difficulty of obtaining amendments during IPR. The Court also points to the opportunity to amend during the initial prosecution; of course, the art in the IPR is now newly being applied - so it is not as if the BRC rule had been used in prosecution to narrow the claim. Which is the entire point of the rule - to read claims broadly to invalidate them, so that they may be narrowed during prosecution. But this goal often fails, as I wrote in my job talk article: The Failure of Public Notice in Patent Prosecution, in which I suggested dumping the BRC rule about 10 years ago.

Whatever the merits of the BRC rule in prosecution, they are lost in IPR, where the goal is to test a patent for validity, not to engage in an iterative process of narrowing the claims with an examiner. I think more liberal allowance of amendments (which is happening a bit) would solve some of the problems of the rule in IPRs.

Thus, my takeaway is a simple one: sometimes the law doesn't line up with preferred policy. It's something you see on the Supreme Court a lot. See, e.g. Justice Sotomayor's dissent today in Utah v. Strieff

Linking PTAB Proceedings to Litigation

We all know about patent litigation. We are learning about PTAB proceedings (Inter Partes Review and Covered Business Methods). But what do we know about both of them? The conventional wisdom is that just about every litigation now has a PTAB proceeding to go along with it. How about strategic PTAB filings untied to litigation?

At the recent WIP/IP conference, I heard no fewer than three people mention Kyle Bass. But not anyone else. And an industry exec at my table commented that there's no evidence Bass made money (or at least would continue to make money) because the market adjusts. So are strategic filings happening, and what do they look like?

Saurabh Vishnubhakat (Texas A&M), Arti Rai (Duke), and Jay Kesan (Illinois) try to get to the bottom of things in a paper forthcoming in the Berkeley Technology Law Journal. Here's the abstract:

The post-grant review proceedings set up at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s Patent and Trial Appeal Board by the America Invents Act of 2011 have transformed the relationship between Article III patent litigation and the administrative state. Not surprisingly, such dramatic change has itself yielded additional litigation possibilities: Cuozzo Speed Technologies v. Lee, a case addressing divergence between the manner in which the PTAB and Article III courts construe patent claims, will soon be argued at the U.S. Supreme Court.

Of the three major new PTAB proceedings, two have proven to be popular as well as controversial: inter partes review and covered business method review. Yet scholarly analysis of litigant behavior in these proceedings has been limited thus far to descriptive data summaries or specific policy perspectives on these types of post-grant challenges, such as their impact on the well-rehearsed patent troll debate. In this article, we present what is to our knowledge the first comprehensive empirical and analytical study of how litigants use these inter partes review and covered business method review proceedings relative to Article III litigation.

A major normative argument for administrative ex post review is that it should be an efficient, accessible, and accurate substitute for Article III litigation over patent validity. We assess the substitution hypothesis, using individual patents as our general unit of analysis as well as investigating patent-petitioner pairs and similar details in greater depth. Our data indicate that the “standard model” of explicit substitution — wherein a district court defendant subsequently brings an administrative challenge to patent validity — occurs for the majority (70%) of petitioners who bring inter partes review challenges. An important implication of this effect is that the PTAB should use a claim construction standard that mirrors that of the district court, so that substituting administrative process for judicial process does not lead to substantively different outcomes.

Notably, however, standard substitution is not the only use of the PTAB: particularly in the area of inter partes reviews, we also see a surprising percentage of cases (about 30%) where the petitioner is not the target of a prior suit on the same patent. The frequency of these nonstandard petitioners, as well as their tendency to join the same petitions as an entity that has been sued, varies by technology. Our data on nonstandard petitioners provide some insight into the extent to which patent challengers are engaging in collective action to contest the validity of patents. Depending on the details of how nonstandard petitioning and collective action are being deployed, this activity could provide a social benefit or constitute a form of harassment.

 I hardly need a blog post after that! But I do have a couple comments. First, the authors do a good job of discussing the literature on whether the substitutive effect is efficient or harassing. Second, and related, there is some good data here on whether motions for stays are being granted in litigation (about half the time, or more depending on interpretation). Third, the "strategic" filing data is interesting, because some is not so strategic (litigation is "in the offing" as they authors note) but some comes out of nowhere.

In general, this is an interesting and helpful look at the new proceedings and a must read for someone who wants to understand the current litigation environment.