Patent litigation precaution method: analyzing characteristics of US litigated and non-litigated patents from 1976 to 2010

Abstract

This study aims to propose an early precaution method which allows predicting probability of patent infringement as well as evaluating patent value. To obtain the purposes, a large-scale analysis on both litigated patents and non-litigated patents issued between 1976 and 2010 by USPTO are conducted. The holistic scale analysis on the two types of patents (3,878,852 non-litigated patents and 31,992 litigated patents in total) issued by USPTO from 1976 to 2010 has not been conducted in literatures and need to be investigated to allow patent researchers to understand the overall picture of the USPTO patents. Also, by comparing characteristics of all litigated patents to that of non-litigated patents, a precaution method for patent litigation can be obtained. Both litigated patents and non-litigated patents are analyzed to understand the differences between the two types of patents in terms of different variables. It is found that there are statistically significant differences for the two types of patents in the following 11 variables: (1) No. of Assignee, (2) No. of Assignee Country, (3) No. of Inventor, (4) Inventor Country, (5) No. of Patent Reference, (6) No. of Patent Citation Received, (7) No. of IPC, (8) No. of UPC, (9) No. of Claim, (10) No. of Non-Patent Reference, and (11) No. of Foreign Reference. Finally, logistic regression is used for predicting the probability of occurrence of a patent litigation by fitting the 11 characteristics of 3,910,844 USPTO patents to a logistic function curve.