The Stanford NPE Litigation Database

I've been busy with grading and end of year activities, which has limited blogging time. I did want to drop a brief note that the Stanford NPE Litigation Database appears to be live now and fully populated with 11 years of data from 2007-2017. They've been working on this database for a long while. It provides limited but important data: Case name and number, district, filing date, patent numbers, plaintiff, defendants, and plaintiff type. The database also includes a link to Lex Machina's data if you have access.

The plaintiff type, especially, is something not available anywhere else, and is the key value of the database (hence the name). There are surely some quibbles about how some are coded (I know of one where I disagree), but on the whole, the coding is much more useful than the "highly active" plaintiff designations in other databases.

I think this database is also useful as a check on other services, as it is hand coded and may correct errors in patent numbers, etc., that I've periodically found. I see the value as threefold:

1. As a supplement to other data, adding plaintiff type
2. As a quick, free guide to which patents were litigated in each case, or which cases involved a particular patent, etc.
3. As a bulk data source showing trends in location, patent counts, etc., useful in its own right.

The database is here: http://npe.law.stanford.edu/ Kudos to Shawn Miller for all his hard work on this, and to Mark Lemley for having the vision to create it and get it funded and completed.

Sue First, Negotiate Later

Just a brief post this week, as I have a perfect storm of non-work related happenings. So, I'll just say that I'm please to announce that my draft article Sue First, Negotiate Later will be published by the Arizona Law Review. The draft is on SSRN, and the longish abstract is below. I may blog about this in more detail in the future, but this is an introduction:

One of the more curious features of patent law is that patents can be challenged by anyone worried about being sued. This challenge right allows potential defendants to file a declaratory relief lawsuit in their local federal district court, seeking a judgment that a patent is invalid or noninfringed. To avoid this home-court advantage, patent owners may file a patent infringement lawsuit first and, by doing so, retain the case in the patent owner’s venue of choice. But there is an unfortunate side effect to such preemptive lawsuits: they escalate the dispute when the parties may want to instead settle for a license. Thus, policies that allow challenges are favored, but they are tempered by escalation caused by preemptive lawsuits. To the extent a particular challenge rule leads to more preemptive lawsuits, it might be disfavored.

This article tests one such important challenge rule. In MedImmune v. Genentech, the U.S. Supreme Court made it easier for a potential defendant to sue first. Whereas the prior rule required threat of immediate injury, the Supreme Court made clear that any case or controversy would allow a challenger to file a declaratory relief action. This ruling had a real practical effect, allowing recipients of letters that boiled down to, “Let’s discuss my patent,” to file a lawsuit when they could not before.

This was supposed to help alleged infringers, but not everyone was convinced. Many observers at the time predicted that the new rule would lead to more preemptive infringement lawsuits filed by patent holders. They would sue first and negotiate later rather than open themselves up to a challenge by sending a demand letter. Further, most who predicted this behavior—including parties to lawsuits themselves—thought that non-practicing entities would lead the charge. Indeed, as time passed, most reports were that this is what happened: that patent trolls uniquely were suing first and negotiating later. But to date, no study has empirically considered the effect of the MedImmune ruling to determine who filed preemptive lawsuits. This Article tests MedImmune’s unintended consequences. The answer matters: lawsuits are costly, and while “quickie” settlements may be relatively inexpensive, increased incentive to file challenges and preemptive infringement suits can lead to entrenchment instead of settlement.

Using a novel longitudinal dataset, this article considers whether MedImmune led to more preemptive infringement lawsuits by NPEs. It does so in three ways. First, it performs a differences-in-differences analysis to test whether case duration for the most active NPEs grew shorter after MedImmune. One would expect that preemptive suits would settle more quickly because they are proxies for quick settlement cases rather than signals of drawn out litigation. Second, it considers whether, other factors equal, the rate of short-lived case filings increased after MedImmune. That is, even if cases grew longer on average, the share of shorter cases should grow if there are more placeholders. Third, it considers whether plaintiffs themselves disclosed sending a demand letter prior to suing.

It turns out that the conventional wisdom is wrong. Not only did cases not grow shorter – cases with similar characteristics grew longer after MedImmune. Furthermore, NPEs were not the only ones who sued first and negotiated later. Instead, every type of plaintiff sent fewer demand letters, NPEs and product companies alike. If anything, the MedImmune experience shows that everyone likes to sue in their preferred venue. As a matter of policy, it means that efforts to dissuade filing lawsuits should be broadly targeted, because all may be susceptible

Using Insurance to Deter Lawsuits

The conventional wisdom (my anecdotal experience, anyway) is that the availability of insurance fuels lawsuits. People that otherwise might not sue would use litigation to access insurance funds. I'm sure there's a literature on this. But most insurance covers both defense and indemnity - that is, litigation costs and settlements. But what if the insurance covered the defense and not any settlement costs? Would that serve as a disincentive to bring suit? It surely would change the litigation dynamic.

In The Effect of Patent Litigation Insurance: Theory and Evidence from NPEs, Bernhard Ganglmair (University of Mannheim - Economics), Christian Helmers (Santa Clara - Economics), Brian J. Love (Santa Clara - Law) explore this question with respect to NPE patent litigation insurance. The draft is on SSRN, and the abstract is here:

We analyze the extent to which private defensive litigation insurance deters patent assertion by non-practicing entities (NPEs). We do so by studying the effect that a patent-specific defensive insurance product, offered by a leading litigation insurer, had on the litigation behavior of insured patents’ owners, all of which are NPEs. We first model the impact of defensive litigation insurance on the behavior of patent enforcers and accused infringers. Assuming that a firm’s purchase of insurance is not observed by patent enforcers, we show that the mere availability of defense litigation insurance can have an effect on how often patent enforcers will assert their patents. Next, we empirically evaluate the insurance policy’s effect on the behavior of owners of insured patents by comparing their subsequent assertion of insured patents with their subsequent assertion of their other patents not included in the policy. We additionally compare the assertion of insured patents with patents held by other NPEs with portfolios that were entirely excluded from the insurance product. Our findings suggest that the introduction of this insurance policy had a large, negative effect on the likelihood that a patent included in the policy was subsequently asserted, and our results are robust across different control groups. Our findings also have importance for ongoing debates on the need to reform the U.S. and European patent systems, and suggest that market-based mechanisms can deter so-called “patent trolling.”

On reading the abstract, I was skeptical. After all, there are a bunch of reasons why more firms would defend against NPEs , why NPEs would be less likely to assert, and so forth. But the interesting dynamics of the patent litigation insurance market have me more convinced. Apparently, the insurance didn't cover any old lawsuit; instead, only specific patents were covered. So, the authors were able to look at the differences between firms asserting covered patents, firms that held both covered and non-covered patents, and firms that had no covered patents. Because each of these firms should be equally affected by background law changes, the differences should be limited to the role of insurance.

And that's what they find, unsurprisingly. Assertions of insured patents went down as compared to uninsured patents, and those cases were less likely to settle -- even with the same plaintiff. My one concern about this finding is that patents targeted for insurance may have been weaker in the first place (hence the willingness to insure), and thus there is self-selection. The paper presents some data on the different patents in order to quell this concern, but if there is a methodological challenge, it is here.

This is a longish paper for an empirical paper, in part because they develop a complex game theory model of the insurance purchasing, patent assertion, and patent defense. It is interesting and worth a read.

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.

Tracking the Sale of Patent Portfolios

Finding out about patent sales and prices is notoriously difficult, yet critically important for patent valuation. Brian Love (Santa Clara Law), Kent Richardson, Erik Oliver, and Michael Costa (Richardson Oliver Law Group) have helped us all out by posting An Empirical Look at the "Brokered" Patent Market to SSRN. Here is the abstract:

We study five years of data on patents listed and sold in the quasi-public “brokered” market. Our data covers almost 39,000 assets, an estimated 80 percent of all patents and applications offered for sale by patent brokers between 2012 and 2016. We provide statistics on the size and composition of the brokered market, including the types of buyers and sellers who participate in the market, the types of patents listed and sold on the market, and how market conditions have changed over time. We conclude with an analysis of what our data can tell us about how to accurately value technology, the costs and benefits of patent monetization, and the brokered market’s ability to measure the impact of changes to patent law.

The article provides some really useful data about brokered patent portfolios - that is, groups of patents sold by brokers rather than "secretly." While brokered transactions are also confidential, their public offering makes them more visible than company to company direct transactions.

The information is quite interesting: the number of patents in each portfolio is quite small - most are less than a dozen. The offering prices have dropped over the last five years (shocker). Operating companies sell a lot of these, and PAE's buy them (something I pointed out five years ago in Patent Troll Myths, and which gave rise to the LOT Network framework- in fact, Open Innovation Network is a now a key buyer). There is a lot more data here, and I don't want to preempt the paper by just repeating it all - it's worth a look. I will note that, as the authors point out, this isn't the whole market and they can't accurately capture sale prices, so they use a "spot check" to estimate what they expect them to be.

Having introduced the paper, I do want to ask, like every good academic, "But what about my article?" Here I'll note a couple takeaways from the paper that bear on my own work on this subject, Patent Portfolios as Securities. First, the first portion of that paper was dedicated to the notion that buying and selling portfolios isn't just about patent trolls. I told anecdotes and used some data, so I'm glad to see a broader based survey provide stronger support for that assertion. Second, my argument was that treating portfolios as securities would force more transparency in sales and valuations. This paper's results support this notion in two ways. Itt shows how difficult it is to get any kind of transparency, even when you have brokered transactions. It also shows how easy it would be to jump from a brokered transaction to a more transparent clearinghouse that might provide the type of valuation information that market participants crave. I view this paper as a useful followon to my own, and hope to write more about how it might bear on the treatment of patent portfolios as assets.

Anyone interested in real-world patent market transactions should give this paper a read. It provides a view into the system that we don't often see. I found it really useful.

Experiments on Bias in Patent Litigation OR Does Everyone Hate NPEs?

Lisa has written about the importance of experiments in patents, and I agree. I read about a really good one today. Bernard Chao (Denver Law) and one of his students, Roderick O'Dorisio, conducted an experiment to simultaneously test whether there is a bias against patentees sued for declaratory relief of non-infringement and against NPEs. To do so, they made identical patent vignettes used to resolve a close, but simple, infringement case. The only differences in the videos shown to the subjects were whether the defendant sued first and whether the plaintiff was an NPE (and in one, both were true). The abstract his here, for the paper forthcoming in the Federal Circuit Bar Journal:

Although everyone believes that telling a good story is an important part of jury persuasion, attorneys inevitably rely on their intuition to choose their stories. Experimental methodologies now allow us to test how effective these stories are. In this article, we rigorously test how two different narratives common to patent law affect mock jurors. First, we look at whether accused infringers can improve their chances of prevailing by being the aggressor. Prior studies have observed that accused infringers that file declaratory judgment actions to vindicate their rights win more often than those that are sued by patent holders. However, these results may simply be an artifact of the selection effects. For example accused infringers may simply be suing on stronger cases. To date, no studies have tried to control for these selection effects and determine whether it is truly the story that sways juries. Second, we looked at whether an accused infringer can influence mock jurors by making a few disparaging remarks about one kind of patentee’s business model, the non-practicing entity (NPE). NPEs, often pejoratively called patent trolls, may have a more difficult time prevailing at trial than practicing entities do.

To test how these narratives affect potential juries, we used a 2x2 between-subjects online experiment. We randomly assigned virtual mock jurors to watch one of four different scenarios of an abbreviated patent trial and render verdicts. The results showed that accused infringers that filed declaratory judgment actions prevailed more often than those where the patentee initiated the lawsuit. In addition, our study found that NPEs won less often than practicing entities. We discuss implications for strategy and policy.

The results are pretty clear - there were marked differences in favor of those who sued first and in favor of those sued by NPEs. And for the group that is both NPEs sued for declaratory relief, the numbers are the lowest of all. I consider this to be a validating check on the findings for each of the individual treatments (though more on that later, as statistically it is not so clear).

As the title of this post implies, there are a couple of ways to read this data. The results here may show an implicit bias against NPEs. Or, NPEs may be the baseline, and it shows a preference for practicing entities. The highest win rate was 39%, so it is not like the plaintiffs were running away with victory here. Or, it may show that taking the bull by the horns is rewarded - patentees prefer defendants who assert their "rights" to defend against infringement.

Nonetheless, the results are a bit shocking - a product making plaintiff was more than twice as likely to win than an NPE sued for declaratory judgment of non-infringement on identical facts and presentations. This makes me think that we have to talk about more than patent quality when we talk about low NPE win rates.

About the statistics: the Declaratory Relief effect was significant at p<.1 (and at p<.05 if you included demographics). The NPE effect was significant at p<.01. Interesting, despite the marked drop for both combined, when the entire model was tested, including the interaction of declaratory relief and NPE, then none of the treatments was statistically significant. This result is difficult to interpret, but my sense from eyeballing the data is that the NPE effect is doing most of the work in the combined model, and so combining the DJ effect with it confounds the model.

A final note on methodology - the authors use Mechanical Turk, and cite to literature that such users are reliable for research like this. They also use some techniques to ensure attention. Finally, if there are attention issues, it is unclear why they would affect one category more than any other. Nonetheless, to the extent that one is skeptical of mTurk, one might be skeptical of the results here.

A Deep Dive on NPE Outcomes

I glibly commented on a friend's Facebook post last week that "patent troll" academic articles are so passe, despite the growing number of articles that use that term as compared to, say, 2012. Now, I shouldn't complain; given that my most cited article is called Patent Troll Myths (2012, naturally), I'd like to think that I'm driving that trend (of course, that's what the folks who wrote in 2007 would say).

But one of the reasons I joked about trolls being so 2012 is that this is where much of the detailed data comes from, and this is when the key articles that are cited by many were published. Indeed, I've published two follow-on articles to Patent Troll Myths, each of which contains more and better data (and thus took longer complete and published later), but which gets only a tiny fraction of the citation love of the original article.

And so it is no surprise that the latest in a series of articles by Chris Cotropia (Richmond), Jay Kesan (Illinois), and David Schwartz (Northwestern) was released with little fanfare. The article, called Heterogeneity among Patent Plaintiffs: An Empirical Analysis of Patent Case Progression, Settlement, and Adjudication is forthcoming in Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, but a draft is on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

This article empirically studies current claims that patent assertion entities (PAEs), sometimes referred to as ‘patent trolls’ or non-practicing entities (NPEs), behave badly in litigation by bringing frivolous patent infringement suits and seeking nuisance fee settlements. The study explores these claims by examining the relationship between the type of patentee-plaintiffs and litigation outcomes (e.g., settlement, grant of summary judgment, trial, and procedural dispositions), while taking into account, among other factors, the technology of the patents being asserted and the identity of the lawyers and judges. The study finds significant heterogeneity among different patent holder entity types. Individual inventors, failed operating companies, patent holding companies, and large patent aggregators each have distinct litigation strategies largely consistent with their economic posture and incentives. These PAEs appear to litigate differently from each other and from operating companies. Accordingly, to the extent any patent policy reform targets specific patent plaintiff types, such reforms should go beyond the practicing entity versus non-practicing entity distinction and understand how the proposed legislation would impact more granular and meaningful categories of patent owners.

In my article A Generation of Patent Litigation, I presented data about how often cases settle, and how that skews our view of how long they last, and who wins. This article extends the authors' earlier work on categorizing just who is filing NPE suits (in 2010 in this article), and asks when they settle for each and every defendant. This is hard work. In most of today's cases, each defendant is sued separately, so when the defendant settles, the case is over. Analytics companies track this all the time...now.

But in 2010, a patentee could sue 100 defendants at once, and you could not tell how long each remained in the case without tracking each defendant. If you only track the end of the case, you capture the one defendant who fought it out, but you miss all the defendants who exited early. The other added value of this series of papers is tracking all plaintiffs by type, rather than one big "NPE" status. I do this in The Layered Patent System, but I only had a subset of cases over a longer period of time, They have captured all of the cases in a single year.  I'll discuss what this all means after the jump.

The Long Awaited FTC Study on Patent Assertion and Nuisance Litigation

After months of speculation that the FTC's long awaited FTC study on patent assertion entities was going to issue any day now, the study has finally issued. The press release is here, and the full PDF is here.There is a lot to learn from this study - the FTC had subpoena power to obtain data unavailable to mere mortals like the scholars who study this area. I thought that the study was generally balanced and well researched. A scan of the footnotes alone will make a great literature review for anyone new to this area (even if it is missing a couple of my articles...).

Some of the highlights of the study come right out of the press release:

The report found two types of PAEs that use distinctly different business models. One type, referred to in the report as Portfolio PAEs, were strongly capitalized and purchased patents outright. They negotiated broad licenses, covering large patent portfolios, frequently worth more than $1 million. The second, more common, type, referred to in the report as Litigation PAEs, frequently relied on revenue sharing agreements to acquire patents. They overwhelmingly filed infringement lawsuits before securing licenses, which covered a small number of patents and were generally less valuable.

The report found that, among the PAEs in the study, Litigation PAEs accounted for 96 percent of all patent infringement lawsuits, but generated only about 20 percent of all reported PAE revenues. The report also found that 93 percent of the patent licensing agreements held by Litigation PAEs resulted from litigation, while for Portfolio PAEs that figure was 29 percent.

The separation of portfolio versus litigation business models was an important one - something I discuss in Patent Portfolios as Securities and Lemley & Melamed discuss in Missing the Forest for the Trolls.

The study also debunks the notion of widespread demand letter abuse, but does show that PAEs tend to sue first and demand later. It shows about $4B in revenues for all study respondents over a 6 year period, 80% of which came from portfolio companies (and mostly not after litigation). The study is unclear what this $4B represents if extended to all PAEs, but provides some statistics that might aid in a ball park calculation for the whole market.

There's more -- a lot more -- to this report, which runs 150 pages before the appendices. The study concludes with some reasonable and mostly uncontroversial ways the system can be made better, such as limiting expensive discovery at the early stages of a case. That said, I do take issue with one point of the study - relating to nuisance litigation. More on this after the jump.

Does Europe Have Patent Trolls?

There have been countless articles—including in the popular press—about the problems (or lack thereof) with "patent trolls" or "non-practicing entities" (NPEs) or "patent-assertion entities" (PAEs) in the United States. Are PAEs and NPEs a uniquely American phenomenon? Not exactly, says a new book chapter, Patent Assertion Entities in Europe, by Brian Love, Christian Helmers, Fabian Gaessler, and Max Ernicke.

They study all patent suits filed from 2000-2008 in Germany's three busiest courts and most cases filed from 2000-2013 in the UK. They find that PAEs (including failed product companies) account for about 9% of these suits and that NPEs (PAEs plus universities, pre-product startups, individuals, industry consortiums, and IP subsidiaries of product companies) account for about 19%. These are small numbers by U.S. standards, but still significant. Most European PAE suits involve computer and telecom technologies. Compared with the United States, more PAE suits are initiated by the alleged infringer, fewer suits involve validity challenges, fewer suits settle, and more suits involve patentee wins.

Many explanations have been offered for the comparative rarity of PAE suits in Europe, including higher barriers to patenting software, higher enforcement costs, cheaper defense costs, smaller damages awards, and more frequent attorney's fee awards. The authors think their "data suggests that each explanation plays a role," but that "the European practice of routinely awarding attorney's fees stands out the most as a key reason why PAEs tend to avoid Europe."

Evaluating Patent Markets

I've been interested in patent markets for some time. In addition to several articles studying NPE litigation, I've written two articles discussing secondary markets explicitly: Patent Portfolios as Securities and Licensing Acquired Patents.

Thus, I was very interested in Michael Burstein's (Cardozo) draft article on the subject, called Patent Markets: A Framework for Evaluation, which is now on SSRN and forthcoming in the Arizona State L.J.

What I like about the approach of this article is that it takes a step back from the question of whether certain types of parties create a market, and asks instead, is having a market at all a good thing?

Here is the abstract:

Patents have become financial assets, in both practice and theory. A nascent market for patents routinely produces headline-grabbing transactions in patent portfolios, and patent assertion entities frequently defend themselves as sources of liquidity essential for a patent market to function. Much of the discourse surrounding these developments assumes that a robust, liquid market for patents would improve the operation of the patent system. In this Essay, I challenge that assumption and systematically assess the cases for and against patent markets. I do so by taking seriously both the underlying innovation promotion goal of the patent system and the lessons of financial economics, and asking what might be the effects of a market for patents that looked roughly like other familiar markets for stocks, real estate, or secondhand goods.

I conclude that, like much in patent law, the effects of robust patent markets are likely to vary with specific technological and business contexts. When there is a close fit between patents and useful technologies, a patent market can support a market for technology that aids in connecting inventors with developers and sources of capital for commercialization. But when that fit breaks down, market pricing could favor litigation over commercialization. Similarly, a liquid patent market might help to allocate the risks of innovation and of patent infringement to the parties best able to bear it, but a kind of moral hazard familiar to the market for subprime mortgages could lead not to more innovation but to more patents, thereby increasing the overall risk in the system. This analysis suggests that we are having the wrong conversation about patent markets. Rather than assuming their utility and asking how to improve them, we should be undertaking empirical research to determine the circumstances in which they will or will not work and exercising caution in invoking the logic of markets in policy debates about the contours of the patent system.

Like other markets, they are good when they are good, and bad when they are bad. Burstein adds a lot of nuance throughout the article, focusing on arguments why markets may be good or not, but without making too many assumptions about any particular technology or patent owner type.

One thing I would add to the article is the importance of timing. Markets early might be better than markets later, even in the same technological contexts. The article would probably put this into the "business context" category, but I think the importance of diffusion, cumulative innovation, and path dependency merit a separate consideration.

In all events, I think the essay adds to the literature and may produce some testable hypotheses as well.

Fiona Scott Morton & Carl Shapiro on the Alignment of Patent Rewards and Contributions

Fiona Scott Morton (Yale School of Management) and Carl Shapiro (Berkeley School of Business) have posted Patent Assertions: Are We Any Closer to Aligning Reward to Contribution?, which has a nice summary of some recent developments related to patent assertion entities (PAEs) and standard-essential patents (SEPs), even for readers who will disagree with their ultimate conclusions.

Scott Morton and Shapiro argue that there is often a "divergence between the reward that a patent holder can obtain by asserting its patent and the social contribution" of the patent. They do not attempt to measure the social value from patents; rather, their argument is based on economic theory. PAEs can impose high litigation costs with little downside risk, especially when they assert low-quality patents for their nuisance value. And royalty stacking and patent hold-up (backed up by the threat of an injunction) can increase the reward to patentees beyond the patent's value, especially for products that comply with standards for which there are many SEPs.

Fee Shifting and Veil Piercing

One of the discussion points about the new PATENT Act reform proposal making the rounds is the "reach through" that pierces the corporate veil for those entities that must pay attorneys' fees. Like so many of these fee shifting proposals, I'm left scratching my head and wondering whether this is where we want to make our stand, heading down the slippery slope of corporate veil piercing. I can think of so many other worthy plaintiffs and defendants where I would rather pierce the veil, and yet we don't.

I don't want to minimize the concern. The protection offered limited liability companies is a real problem for those who want to collect against them. I've known this since I was shocked to read Walkovszky v. Carlton in corporations law. The defendant owned 20 taxicabs in 10 corporations, but the court allowed liability only against the one corporation that owned the cab that ran over the plaintiff. While it seems ridiculous to allow corporations to avoid liability this way, this is a deeply engrained rule of law in this country. In any event, I haven't seen any real data about how often fee awards go unpaid, so I don't know just how much of a problem this really is. I suppose it will become a more common problem if there is more fee shifting.

Make no mistake, though, the PATENT Act and all other veil-piercing fee proposals are not about under-capitalized shell companies - not at a deeper level. These proposals stand for the proposition that we hate patent enforcement by non-practicing entities so much that we're just going to throw out all the rules that apply to everyone else, no matter how bad an actor all those other people are. Only patent plaintiffs are so despicable that they are no longer entitled to corporate status.  And this is not just about patent acquisition companies - this covers inventor operated companies, research companies and think tanks, failed startups, and anyone else who doesn't make a product.

I should note here that I'm not wholly opposed to fee shifting. I think there can be some benefit to reciprocal fee shifting, and I also think that the "objectively unreasonable" standard is better than a presumption. I should also note that this is not a plaintiff only issue. Only a few short years ago, record companies sued a venture capital firm for investing in copyright defendant Napster, a company that had, at best, a crapshoot of winning its case. That investor suit was also unwarranted for the same reasons that this proposal is: targeted veil piercing to support substantive policy goals is not a great idea -- the bell tolls for thee.

After the jump is my nitty-gritty analysis of the fee-shifting and veil-piercing proposal, and discussion about why I think it's a problem.

The Layered Patent System

For those (likely few) people who read this blog but don't read Patently-O, I have a guest post on my article The Layered Patent System, 101 Iowa L. Rev. (forthcoming), at Patently-O today.

Haber & Werfel on Trolls

Stephen Haber and Seth Werfel (Stanford Political Science) have posted Why Do Inventors Sell to Patent Trolls? Experimental Evidence for the Asymmetry Hypothesis. Here is the abstract:

Why do individual patent holders assign their patents to "trolls" rather than license their technologies directly to manufacturers or assert them through litigation? We explore the hypothesis that an asymmetry in financial resources between individual patent holders and manufacturers prevents individuals from making a credible threat to litigate against infringement. First, individuals may not be able to cover the upfront costs associated with litigation. Second, unsuccessful litigation can result in legal fees so large as to bankrupt the individual. Therefore, a primary reason why individual patent holders sell to PAEs is that they offer insurance and liquidity. We test this hypothesis by experimentally manipulating these financial constraints on a representative sample of inventors and entrepreneurs affiliated with Stanford University and UC Berkeley. We find that in the absence of these constraints, subjects were significantly less likely to sell their patent to a PAE in a hypothetical scenario. Furthermore, treatment effects were significant only for subjects who were hypothesized to be most sensitive to these constraints.

For readers who, like me, are most curious about the experiment, here are the details: They invited 1200 inventors or entrepreneurs to fill out an email survey and ended up with 103 useful responses. (This seems like a reasonable response rate given the nature of the survey, though it is worth thinking about whether the type of people who respond are likely to influence the results.) Subjects wrote about an improvement for a product they use regularly, and then were told to imagine they had been awarded a patent for the idea that was worth $1 million, and also that a large corporation saw the idea and decided to infringe the patent without paying for it. Subjects in the control condition were given the option of selling to a patent assertion entity (PAE) for $100,000 or hiring a lawyer to assert the patent for $1,000 per hour; subjects in the treatment condition were told the lawyer worked on a contingent fee basis for one-third the total award. They also tested the subjects' risk preferences and loss aversion, and they asked subjects to self-identify as inventors or entrepreneurs.

Haber and Werfel found that the contingent fee treatment reduced the proportion of subjects who chose to sell to PAEs, and that the effect was only significant for subjects who either self-identified as inventors rather than entrepreneurs, or subjects who exhibited loss aversion. These results seem somewhat intuitive given their setup, though I think the implications for patent policy are less clear.

Final CELS Recap: Trolls, Anticommons, M&A

I have already posted on the papers from the Intellectual Property I session at the Conference on Empirical Legal Studies (CELS) by Aghion et al., Abrams et al., and Frakes & Wasserman. There were three more papers selected for the Intellectual Property II session on the second day of CELS, which I'll briefly describe here:

Abrams et al. on Patent Value and Citations

Next up in my CELS IP recap: David Abrams (Penn) presented Patent Value and Citations: Creative Destruction or Strategic Disruption? (with Ufuk Akcigit & Jillian Popadak), for which Browyn Hall served as the discussant. This paper addresses one of the key quandaries of innovation policy: how do you measure innovation?

Why Stop at Fees? The Case for Making All Patent Losers Pay, and Pay Heavily

Guest post by Professor Jonathan Masur, University of Chicago School of Law

The excellent op-ed published last week by Chief Judge Rader, Colleen Chien, and David Hricik has re-ignited the debate surrounding attorneys’ fee awards in patent cases. This conversation has dovetailed with the renewed focus on patent trolls, spurred by congressional and presidential attention to the issue. Taken together, these issues present the possibility of a productive approach to the problem of patent trolls—and to firms that assert weak patents more generally.

Feldman on IP Wrongs

Do we need a new doctrine of "inappropriate uses of intellectual property"? This is the proposal Robin Feldman (UC Hastings Law) makes in her working paper Inappropriate Uses of Intellectual Property—Intellectual Property Wrongs. Her broad new doctrine would (1) allow courts to dismiss suits when the plaintiff has behaved inappropriately; (2) allow courts to craft remedies that account for improper behavior; and (3) create an affirmative cause of action that allows for both damages and equitable relief.

Adam Mossoff- The Rise and Fall of the First American Patent Thicket: The Sewing Machine War of the 1850s

Have scholars and critics misconstrued patent thickets, incremental innovation, and patent trolling as modern phenomena? In The Rise and Fall of the First American Patent Thicket: The Sewing Machine War of the 1850s, Professor Adam Mossoff (George Mason University School of Law) thoroughly examines the history of the sewing machine and illustrates how these “modern” phenomena have long existed in innovation. In this article, Professor Mossoff provides an overwhelmingly informative historical study of the first American patent thicket and subsequent patent pool, discusses the importance of an in-depth historical analysis, and challenges a few widely-held assumptions.

Sarah R.W. Rajec: Tailoring Remedies To Spur Innovation

Will we ever find a perfect remedial scheme in patent law? Ever since the dawn of the patent system, our law has sought to tailor the patent system so that it optimally balances its grants of exclusive monopoly power with the incentives it provides to prospective inventors. In Tailoring Remedies To Spur Innovation, Sarah R. Wasserman Rajec, a Visiting Associate Professor at GW, has written a thought-provoking draft paper in which she seeks to move us one step closer to that ideal balance. Incorporating useful insights from the economics and antitrust literatures, she argues that the law surrounding permanent injunctions in patent suits can be better adapted to promote innovative ends.