Earlier this week, David Schwartz, Christopher Cotropia (Richmond), and Jay Kesan (Illinois) coauthored a guest post titled “The Value of Open Data for Patent Policy” on the Patently-O blog. The post calls for more publicly available data in the field of empirical legal studies, especially in the study of patent assertion entities—PAEs, commonly known as patent trolls, which the authors have studied and written about. The following is an excerpt from the post:
Harlan Krumholz, one of the nation’s leading medical researchers, recently wrote an important New York Times Op-Ed piece called Give the Data to the People. Dr. Krumholz praised Johnson & Johnson for making all of its clinical trial data available to scientists around the world. This included not only the conclusions in published articles, but also unpublished raw data. Companies are often reluctant to share raw data because their competitors may benefit. In the medical field, there are also patient privacy concerns. But releasing the raw data permits other researchers to learn from and build upon existing data. It also offers other researchers the ability to replicate and verify the findings of important medical studies. Dr. Krumholz concludes: “For the good of society, this is a breakthrough that should be replicated throughout the research world.”
We believe that Dr. Kumholz’s call for more publicly available data is applicable to empirical legal studies. It is especially critical, in our view, to the study of patent assertion entities (“PAEs,” which some refer to as patent trolls). There is an important public policy debate underway about the role of PAEs within patent law. There have been reports in the press about PAEs—including a high profile report by the President’s Council of Economic Advisors—that relied upon confidential data. In his State of the Union address, President Obama called on Congress to enact patent reform legislation. The main basis for the reform is alleged abuses by “patent trolls.” Unfortunately, much of the raw data about patent litigation is not publicly available.
As academic researchers, we are interested in data about PAEs. We have previously studied and written an article about patent infringement lawsuits filed in 2010 and 2012. Because of the importance of the debate about PAEs, we released the raw data from our study to the public (here) to permit others to evaluate and study. Others have downloaded and commented on our data to us, and we have gone back and verified particular classifications in some instances. We believe more publicly available data is necessary.
Click here to continue reading.
Leave a Reply