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Full-Text Articles in Law
The Private Costs Of Patent Litigation, James Bessen, Michael J. Meurer
The Private Costs Of Patent Litigation, James Bessen, Michael J. Meurer
Faculty Scholarship
This paper estimates the total cost of patent litigation to alleged infringers. We use a large sample of stock market event studies around the date of lawsuit filings for US public firms from 1984-99. We find that the total costs of litigation are much greater than legal fees and costs are large even for lawsuits that settle. Lawsuits cost alleged infringers about $28.7 million ($92) in the mean and $2.9 million in the median. Moreover, infringement risk rose sharply during the late 1990s to over 14% of R&D spending. Small firms have lower risk relative to R&D.
The New Federal Circuit Mandamus, Paul Gugliuzza
The New Federal Circuit Mandamus, Paul Gugliuzza
Faculty Scholarship
This Article explores an ongoing revolution in the mandamus jurisprudence of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, the court of appeals with nearly exclusive jurisdiction over patent cases. Before December 2008, the Federal Circuit had never used the interlocutory writ of mandamus to order a district court to transfer a case to a more convenient forum, denying each one of the twenty-two petitions it had decided on that issue. Since that time, however, the court has overturned eleven different venue decisions on mandamus. Remarkably, ten of those eleven cases have come from the same district court, the …
The Private And Social Costs Of Patent Trolls, Michael J. Meurer, James Bessen, Jennifer Ford
The Private And Social Costs Of Patent Trolls, Michael J. Meurer, James Bessen, Jennifer Ford
Faculty Scholarship
The emergence of nonpracticing entities (NPEs) — firms that purchase and hold patent rights but neither innovate themselves nor use the patents in the production of goods — is supposed to incentivize innovation by providing a ready market for innovators. We test this idea empirically and find that NPEs produce little returns for innovators or for their own shareholders, but they place significant costs on productive firms that violate patents inadvertently. Indeed, it appears that NPEs — often disparagingly called “patent trolls” — discourage productive firms from innovating for fear that they will then be subject to a patent troll …