Project Lead
Shawn Miller, JD, PhD, Research Lead: smiller@law.stanford.edu
Related Organizations
The Stanford Non-Practicing Entity (NPE) Litigation Dataset (the Dataset) is the first ever publicly available database to track comprehensively how practicing entities, non-practicing entities (NPEs), and patent assertion entities (PAEs) claim patent ownership rights in litigation. NPEs do not make products or offer services while PAEs—often referred to as “patent trolls”—employ patents primarily to obtain license fees, rather than support the transfer or commercialization of technology. Critics have come to believe that steadily increasing PAE enforcement activity, including litigation, is harming innovation and serving as a tax on producers and consumers. Stanford Law student researchers are tracking every lawsuit filed in U.S. district courts from 2000 to the present and identifying each patent plaintiff as either a practicing entity or as one of eleven types of NPEs. Categorization of all 55,000 lawsuits filed from 2000 to 2015 becomes publicly available in late 2017 and this full Dataset will continue to be updated with recent and future cases. The currently available compilation represents a 20% random sample of over 10,800 lawsuits filed from 2000 to 2015 and is available for download below.
Stanford Law student researchers and Stanford IP Research Fellow Shawn Miller have coauthored the Introduction to the Stanford NPE Litigation Dataset (the project report). The project report includes detailed explanation of the motivations for creating the Dataset, the lawsuit categorization taxonomy and methodology, and quality control measures taken in constructing the Dataset.
Note: In our Key Findings, we define PAE lawsuits as those with category 1, 4 or 5 patent asserters. See Table 1 for the name of each patent asserter category.
Suggested Research Uses
The Dataset can aid Congress and the Patent Office in developing effective laws and policies and provides a valuable tool to help patent holders, policy makers, judges, litigators, industry, scholars, and researchers better understand the nature of entities filing patent suits.By lending transparency to the amount and characteristics of PAE litigation, the Dataset can help resolve the fact or fiction of alleged PAE problems. Scholars, legal professionals, policy makers, patent holders, and the public will benefit from better understanding that may, in turn, yield more effective policies, laws, and practices. Scholars can also use the Dataset to examine the effects of past patent reform actions, such as the AIA, on different types of patent owners.
Scholars
- Empirically confirm past research conclusions using the full population of lawsuits
- Conduct original research on differences in enforcement behavior across patent owner type
Judges and Patent Attorneys
- Gain understanding of patent litigation trends
- Gain transparency into different types of patent asserters
- Improve case management practices
Policy Makers
- Develop a deeper understanding of the sources of patent enforcement costs given current rules
- Enhance and develop regulations and statutes