Patent cases are well-suited for detailed empirical investigations because of the availability of specialized databases, such as the Stanford IP Litigation Clearinghouse (IPLC) … See http://www.law.stanford.edu/program/centers/iplc. The IPLC is presently operated by a private company, Lex Machina, Inc. (https://lexmachina.com) in Palo Alto, California. The dataset for the empirical study reported […]
Patent cases at the district court level are one of the most contentious forms of litigation. Scorched-earth litigation tactics, which include protracted discovery battles and overly aggressive motion practice, are common. Overzealous advocacy is not only costly to the parties but also burdens the courts and undermines the public interest […]
Commentators have observed for years that patents do less good and cause more harm in the software industry than in other industries such as pharmaceuticals. Software patents create thickets of overlapping inventions, and are asserted in droves by patent trolls against innovative companies. Some have argued that software isn?t the […]
The International Trade Commission (ITC) is an integral part of the American patent system. Although it can only block imports on behalf of domestic industries, now that most technology products are manufactured abroad and Congress has relaxed the domestic industry requirement, nearly every patentee is a potential ITC complainant and […]
While many believe the patent system has hit a historic and unprecedented low, discontent with patents, and in particular with software patents, is nothing new. In 1966, a Presidential Commission recommended prohibiting software patents because of the PTO’s inability to vet them. In 1883, the Supreme Court railed against “speculative […]
Injunctions have often been viewed as mere “off switches” that prevent future violations of rights protected by so-called property rules. But injunctions in fact come in a variety of forms having different objects, scopes, and degrees of effectiveness. In practical situations, an injunction might amount to little more than a […]
Very few studies have made use of new electronic resources such as Lex Machina, which provides full case dockets and other relevant data for intellectual property law cases. While the Lex Machina data is based on existing data from PACER, the federal court system’s official electronic filing database, Lex Machina […]
Trademark law depends for its justification on economic arguments that cannot account for much of the law’s recent development, nor for mounting empirical evidence that consumer decisionmaking is inconsistent with assumptions of rational choice. But the only extant theoretical alternative to economic analysis is a Lockean “natural rights” theory that […]
Patent assertion entities (PAEs), or patent “trolls,” use the threat of an injunction to hold up product producing companies in patent suits. The Supreme Court’s 2006 eBay decision largely ended that practice, at least in district court. But it has had the unintended consequence of driving PAEs to a different forum, […]
We propose and analyze a distributed cooperative caching strategy based on the Evolutive Summary Counters (ESC), a new data structure that stores an approximated record of the data accesses in each computing node of a search engine. The ESC capture the frequency of accesses to the elements of a data […]