Lex Machina Details 2015 End-of-Year IP Trends
Lex Machina has published an article highlighting IP trends and data from 2015, including the fact that the distribution of patent cases among district courts remains highly uneven, with the Eastern District of Texas receiving 2,540 cases comprising 43.6 percent of all cases filed in 2015.
Patent litigation in U.S. district courts grew in 2015, with 5,830 patent cases filed, a 15.0 percent rise from 2014 (5,070 cases). Except for 2013, which remains the high-water year for patent litigation (6,114 cases), 2015 surpassed all other previous years.
The report, written by Brian Howard, covers statistics showing filing by quarters for the most-active districts.
Another section of the report covers activity at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), charting petitions by quarter.
The section on trademark litigation reports that fewer trademark cases were filed in 2015 than in any of the previous 10 years, although 2015’s total of 3,449 cases is only 11.6% lower than the median over the same time frame.
Lex Machina’s Copyright Report explains the difference between file sharing cases (those having John Doe or anonymous defendants and accusations based on file sharing technology such as BitTorrent), and other, more traditional cases, detailing the trends.
