Patent Litigation Was Down, Now It’s Back Up

Remember when people were saying that patent litigation was dropping and that patent trollAn entity in the business of being infringed — by analogy to the mythological troll that exacted payments from the unwary.  Cf. NPE, PAE, PME.  See Reitzig and Henkel, Patent Trolls, the Sustainability of ‘Locking-in-to-Extort’ Strategies, and Implications for Innovating Firms. problems were all over?

Turns out, not so much.

According to Lex Machina’s data, there were 441 patent litigation filings in December 2014. The previous month, there were 335. That’s an increase of 32%!

It seems that my comic from a few months ago was basically right:

Here’s an old ditty from the Great Depression that sums it up: