Patent Litigation Data from US District Court Electronic Records (1963-2015)

Abstract

Economists, legal scholars and policy makers are concerned about the impact of patent litigation on the rate and direction of US innovation and on the functioning of the US intellectual property system. At this time, however, there is no reliable, comprehensive, free and publicly accessible source of patent litigation data. As a first step towards overcoming this limitation, the Office of the Chief Economist (OCE) at the United States Patent and Trademark Office, in collaboration with the National Technical Information Service, undertook a patent litigation data pilot. This paper describes two patent litigation databases from which OCE generated comprehensive patent litigation datasets as a result of the pilot and is releasing for public use. First, we obtained the docket reports on the universe of patent litigation cases in PACER and RECAP and created a dataset for the period 1963-2015. Second, we captured the metadata for these cases, which includes information on the case identifier, parties involved, filing date, and district court location. We hope that free access to comprehensive data will help advance research on the evolving patent litigation landscape and its economic impact.