It is ironic and highly likely that the AIA – the legislation touted by its proponents as the instrument to reduce the number of costly patent lawsuits – is in fact the major cause for their increase in the last three years.
Several factors created by the AIA caused, and will continue to cause, increased rate of lawsuit filings. As this graph shows, filings during 2009 – the last year before the onset of the surge shown in Gene’s article – patents that were 1-5 years old were most frequently the subject of an infringement lawsuit. In contrast, filings in 2012 were dominated by newly issued patents at an unprecedented factor of two compared to any other patent age category. The only plausible explanation to this change that comes to mind is based on the relationship between Federal court actions and the AIA-created administrative proceedings of Inter Partes Review (IPR), Post Grant Review (PGR), and the Transitional Program for Covered Business Method Patents (TPCB), which is governed by PGR rules.
↧