Patent Troll Cases Unlikely To Drop Significantly

The statistics are striking. "Patent trolls" (companies that do not create products or services based on their patents, but instead use patents to extort license fees) are continuing to file large numbers of patent infringement lawsuits, now against advertising agencies, restaurants, retailers, financial institutions, and other businesses not typically subject to patent risk. Indeed, more than 4,500 patent infringement actions were filed in 2016, the fifth straight year with at least that many new patent infringement suits.

Of particular concern is that patent trolls have begun collecting "software" or "business method" patents covering basic digital technologies such as scanning documents or using online shopping carts on websites. In the past, however, despite the broad applicability of these patents, the Supreme Court's 2014 decision in Alice v. CLS Bank provided defendants some cover, labeling many of these technologies unpatentable "abstract ideas" and