Litigation by Patent Trolls Has Cost Half a Trillion Dollars in Lost Wealth in the Last 20 Years and Decreased Innovation Incentives in Software and Related Industries

Litigation by patent trolls, also called non-practicing entities (NPEs) because they produce or manufacture nothing but merely manage patent portfolios, have cost a half a trillion dollars in lost wealth in the period from 1990 to 2010 or $80 billion per year according to a study by James Bessen, Jennifer Ford and Michael J. Meurer in THE PRIVATE AND SOCIAL COSTS OF PATENT TROLLS, Boston University School of Law Working Paper No. 11-45 (September 19, 2011), Revision of November 9, 2011. The authors write in their Executive Summary:

"[A] self-described new crop of NPEs has emerged that asserts patents and litigates them on an unprecedented scale, involving thousands of defendants every year in hundreds of lawsuits. Do these litigating NPEs improve markets for technology and increase incentives for small inventors? Or are they “patent trolls” who exploit weaknesses in the patent system?

This paper makes several findings about this litigation.

First, by observing what happens to a defendant’s stock price around the filing of a patent lawsuit, we are able to assess the effect of the lawsuit on the firm’s wealth, after taking into account general market trends and random factors affecting the individual stock. We find that NPE lawsuits are associated with half a trillion dollars of lost wealth to defendants from 1990 through 2010. During the last four years the lost wealth has averaged over $80 billion per year. These defendants are mostly technology companies who invest heavily in R&D. To the extent that this litigation represents an unavoidable business cost to technology developers, it reduces the profits that these firms make on their technology investments. That is, these lawsuits substantially reduce their incentives to innovate.

Second, by exploring publicly listed NPEs, we find that very little of this loss of wealth represents a transfer to inventors. This suggests that the loss of incentives to the defendant firms is not matched by an increase in incentives to other inventors.

Third, the characteristics of this litigation are distinctive: it is focused on software and related technologies, it targets firms that have already developed technology, and most of these lawsuits involve multiple large companies as defendants. These characteristics suggest that this litigation exploits weaknesses in the patent system. In our book Patent Failure, we argue that patents on software and business methods are litigated much more frequently because they have“fuzzy boundaries.” The scope of these patents is not clear, they are often written in vague language, and technology companies cannot easily find them and understand what they claim. It appears that much of the NPE litigation takes advantages of these weaknesses.

We conclude that the loss of billions of dollars of wealth associated with these lawsuits harms society. While the lawsuits increase incentives to acquire vague, over-reaching patents, they decrease incentives for real innovation overall."

[emphasis added by LawPundit]

Read the whole thing here.

The paper has been referenced by the blawg
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