The Prior Art

Data from Stanford shows 2007 spike in patent defendants

Stanford Law School has unveiled its IP Litigation Clearinghouse, which includes data on 78,000  copyright, patent, trademark, and trade secret lawsuits. That includes 23,000 patent suits, and the patent data has just been made public. I can already tell this will be a great tool that I'll use a great deal, and I look forward to seeing what others come up with.

My colleague Zusha Elinson at the Recorder attended Stanford's event unveiling the IPLC. His article about the IPLC, published yesterday, is worth reading. Initial statistics show that there was indeed a real spike in the number of defendants sued in 2007; that spike may not be repeated in 2008. See graph below. This data generally confirms the estimate calculated by Rick Frenkel earlier this year. It also confirms the anecdotal evidence I reported in the IPLB 2008 Patent Litigation survey. Lemley attributes this spike to a rush by holding companies to file suit before any patent reform legislation took effect.

Stanford Law Professor Mark Lemley (pictured), who was a driving force behind the IPLC, also said he's teaming up with Intellectual Ventures founder Nathan Myhrvold in order to classify exactly who is filing all the patent infringement lawsuits. I'll be watching that project, which sounds like it could be like a Troll Tracker blog on steroids. Lemley and Myhrvold, it should be noted, have very different views about the patent-holding companies some deride as "patent trolls." Stanford's IPLC announcement has much more information about the project.

Blast from the (recent) past — Troll Tracker's take on 2007

In my last post I discussed briefly our 2007 patent litigation survey. In January, Patent Troll Tracker blogger Rick Frenkel reported his own survey of 2007 patent litigation, counting defendants in seven top jurisdictions and extrapolating those numbers to report a dramatic 31.5% increase in the number of defendants sued last year.

I have not checked this data, but I can say most of the lawyers I spoke to for our annual patent litigation survey thought there was a clear increase in multi-defendant lawsuits. (Google experienced an 800 percent increase in patent litigation last year, to take one prominent example.)

I think it's worth getting a variety of views out there about the year that was in patent litigation, and I'd rather let this stand in Frenkel's own voice. This post is from an archived copy I saved in late February.