Five Ways to Parlay Patent Infringement into Profits

According to a January 2018 Seyfarth Shaw LLP report titled “2017 Patent Litigation: A Statistical Overview,” the past five years have seen a “significant increase” of patent litigation cases filed with the Patent Trial and Appeals Board (PTAB) and the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC).

Last year the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), itself, published its own report citing a “drastic rise in patent litigation” that also referenced a USPTO working paper ominously revealing that “economists, legal scholars and policy makers are concerned about the impact of patent litigation on the rate and direction of U.S. innovation and on the functioning of the U.S. intellectual property system.” 

These and other factoids make clear that patent infringement is alive and well in the United States, most often to the financial dismay of patent-holders who spend untold hours and egregious sums of money trying to protect their intellectual property—and…