Schwartz — Proxy Patent Litigation

*UPDATE: Read Part 2 of Prof. Schwartz’s post on proxy patent litigation here.

Professor David Schwartz continues his month of guest blogging at Concurring Opinions with a new post titled “Proxy Patent Litigation.” Read an excerpt from the post below:

In the last decade or so, patent litigation in the United States has undergone enormous changes. Perhaps most profound is the rise in enforcement of patents held by people and entities who don’t make any products or otherwise participate in the marketplace. Some call these patent holders ‘non-practicing entities’ (NPEs), while others use the term ‘patent assertion entities’ (PAEs), and some pejoratively refer to some or all of these patent holders as ‘trolls.’ These outsiders come in many different flavors: individual inventors, universities, failed startups, and holding companies that own a patent or family of patents.

This post is about a particular type of outsider that is relatively new: the mass patent aggregator.

Click here to continue reading, and watch for part 2 of this post soon. Also, be sure to check out these additional posts from Prof. Schwartz’s guest series at Concurring Opinions: “The Varying Use of Legal Scholarship by the U.S. Supreme Court across Issues”, “Should Empirical Legal Scholars Have Special Responsibilities?”, “Software Patent Eligibility”