By now, the story of patent trolls has become well-known: a small company with no products of its own threatens lawsuits against larger companies who inadvertently infringe its portfolio of broad patents. The scenario has become so common that we don't even try to cover all the cases here at Ars. If we did, we'd have little time to write about much else.But anecdotal evidence is one thing. Data is another. Three Boston University researchers have produced a rigorous empirical estimate of the cost of patent trolling. And the number is breath-taking: patent trolls ("non-practicing entity" is the clinical term) have cost publicly traded defendants $500 billion since 1990. And the problem has become most severe in recent years. In the last four years, the costs have averaged $83 billion per year. The study says this is more than a quarter of US industrial research and development spending during those years. [...]
Software patents accounted for about 62 percent of the lawsuits. In contrast, only two percent of the lawsuits involved drug or chemical patents, and six percent involved mechanical patents. The authors didn't necessarily start with a random sample of all patent litigation, so this result should be interpreted with caution. Still, it's safe to say that the proliferation of software patents has been a major contributor to the explosion of patent litigation.
In their 2008 book, Bessen and Meurer showed that, outside the chemical and pharmaceutical industries, the cost of patent litigation had already begun to exceed the rewards to inventors by the year 2000. Their new work suggests that the problem has gotten much, much worse since then.
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