Patent Wars Caused by little known Federal Court


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The number of patent disputes, especially in the fast evolving tech sector, has exploded.  We've seen mega-corporations go to "war" over their patents. Samsung v Apple, Microsoft v Android, Apple v the World, etc. 

 

My initial impression was that these ever increasing number of disputes was a sign of a healthy tech industry combating each other for rights to innovative products but after reading this I'm much more sceptical of the entire Patent system as a whole.

 

What's even more fascinating is that the Court created to specifically address our patents has only compounded the problems, and more incredibly often rules in contradiction of Supreme Court jurisprudence. 

 

 


In 1982 Congress consolidated all patent appeals into a single appeals court, the Federal Circuit. Shortly afterwards, there was an explosion of low-quality patents. The Federal Circuit has systematically changed the law, sometimes even undermining Supreme Court precedent, to favor patent interests. Economists Matthew Henry and John Turner analyzed a dataset of district and appellate patent decisions for the years 1953 to 2002 and report that patentees are three times more likely to win on appeal after a district court ruling of invalidity in the post-1982 era. The result has been an explosion of patents and patent litigation.

 

 

Many on this site tend to blame the corporations for filing these disputes, but I don't blame companies/individuals for waging these patent wars when the Court seems so eager to create them.

 

The data shows that the number of patents issued has grown exponentially in the last 32 years, from 63,005 in 1982 to 325,407 in 2014. Many of the patents for trivial and non-original functions, Dourado explains,

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Simply revert to the pre 1982 system, or enforce the fact that Supreme court decisions are final?

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