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The Stanford University Law School now has its Non-Practicing Entity (NPE) Litigation Database online. It contains over 43,000 patent lawsuits filed from 2007 to 2017, supposedly in full, and searchable in a wide variety of fields, including plaintiff type, party name, and patent number. Some sample searches are demoed, free of registration. An additional 20% random sample of over 12,500 lawsuits filed from 2000 to 2017 is also available. The database will be updated with recent and future cases on an ongoing basis.
The Stanford Non-Practicing Entity (NPE) Litigation Database (the Database) is the first publicly available database to track comprehensively how practicing entities, non-practicing entities, and patent assertion entities (PAEs) use patents in litigation. NPEs are entities that do not make products or offer services. PAEs—often called "patent trolls"—are NPEs that employ patents primarily to obtain license fees, rather than to support the transfer or commercialization of technology. Patent litigation by practicing entities, PAEs, and other types of NPEs including universities and early-stage startups differs in its purpose and impact on innovation, so the Database enables more sophisticated research into the working of the U.S. patent system.
To complete the Database, Stanford Law student researchers review every lawsuit filed in U.S. district courts from 2000 to the present and identify each patent plaintiff as either a practicing entity or as one of eleven types of NPE. The project report, Who's Suing Us? Decoding Patent Plaintiffs since 2000 with the Stanford NPE Litigation Dataset defines the twelve categories of patent owner. It also includes descriptive statistics and trends in the share of U.S. patent litigation attributable to patent owners in each category, based on a random sample of over 10,800 lawsuits filed from 2000 to 2015. Additional information on the genesis of this project is available at https://law.stanford.edu/projects/stanford-npe-litigation-database/.
The database is only available to registered users.
(Score: 3, Informative) by pipedwho on Friday May 17 2019, @01:11AM
It is VERY common to patent only a critical part of a larger process. This may be legitimate, for example when all the players in an industry already do something, there's no need to describe the whole process when you're just adding a new step (or a change to an existing one).
However, it is also a 'defensive' patent method where you take out patents based on the assumption that a process already exists (even if you're the only that knows how to do it) and then patenting one (or a few) critical parts of the process. This is done because most patents are evolutionary techniques that are usually (not always, but usually) things that are self evident to anyone working in the field towards a general goal. And are often processes that are reasonably well understood by that industry. If you can get in first and patent some of the more obvious critical steps, it can block a competitor who hasn't even seen or heard of your patents from implementing the process (even if most of the steps are dramatically different to how you'd do it). This also prevents the competitors from working out the details of your process if they haven't already worked out their own optimal methods. And naturally this makes the patent database useless to anyone that doesn't already know all the external details. These sort of shenanigans help keep a nice high barrier of entry into the industry.
There are also examples of patents that have certain critical elements left out (or made vague) so it can't be implemented, while at the same time covering the 'invention'. For example, lets say I make a device that needs a certain size part to work correctly. If the rest of patent is otherwise valid, by just specifying the part "sized with a range between X and Y", or even just not mentioning that critical detail, then the patent will often get approved - but still require a large amount of trial and error or further research for anyone trying to implement the patent after it has expired.
It's a sad state of affairs, and one of the (many) big flaws in the patent system.