Professor David Schwartz has authored two new articles on patent law, both of which are available for download on SSRN.
The first, On Mass Patent Aggregators, was recently published in volume 114 of the Columbia Law Review Sidebar. See the abstract below:
This Essay responds to and extends upon Mark A. Lemley & A. Douglas Melamed’s article, Missing the Forest for the Trolls, 113 Colum. L. Rev. 2117 (2013). Lemley & Melamed’s article provides a refreshingly balanced and nuanced view of the litigation system. Their article defends, at least partially, mass patent aggregators. However, mass patent aggregators are much more complicated than Lemley & Melamed’s article describes. This Essay explains many of the complexities that surround the acquisition and enforcement of patents by mass patent aggregators. Some of these complexities cut in favor of Lemley & Melamed’s conclusions, but others do not.
Download the article from SSRN here.
The second article, Understanding the Realities of Modern Patent Litigation (coauthored with John Allison & Mark Lemley), will be published in June in the Texas Law Review. See the abstract below:
Sixteen years ago, two of us published the first detailed empirical look at patent litigation. In this Article, we update and expand the earlier study with a new hand-coded data set. We evaluate all substantive decisions rendered by any court in every patent case filed in 2008 and 2009 — decisions made between 2009 and 2013. We consider not just patent validity but also infringement and unenforceability. Moreover, we relate the outcomes of those cases to a host of variables, including variables related to the parties, the patents, and the courts in which those cases were litigated. The result is a comprehensive picture of the outcomes of modern patent litigation, one that confirms conventional wisdom in some respects but upends it in others. In particular, we find a surprising amount of continuity in the basic outcomes of patent lawsuits over the past twenty years, despite rather dramatic changes in who brought patent suits during that time.
Download the article from SSRN here.
For more of Prof. Schwartz’s scholarship on patents and patent litigation, visit his SSRN author page.
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