As mentioned in an earlier post, the Eastern District of Texas and District of Delaware are popular regions for patent lawsuits. With all the talk about patents lately, we may have forgotten about copyright and trademark infringements. In the Patently-O blog entry, Disjunction in IP Litigation: Patent Courts are not Copyright Courts, it is found that there is barely any copyright and trademark lawsuits ongoing in the above two districts. The Central District of California, which is third in place for patent lawsuits, ranks first in the number of copyright and trademark lawsuits.
It is interesting to find out that this is due to the different Courts for patent, copyright and trademark infringements. Even though they are all infringement of intellectual property, they are managed by different government offices. This is, as the author Dennis Crouch said, odd. There could be some generality that could be applied for the different forms of infringement, but due to the different courts, there will be different rulings for similar cases. A collaboration between the two courts could also lead to faster cases.
Still, with the large number of patent lawsuits that are ongoing, it probably would be good to separately classify them. Copyright and trademarks have been around and well known by the community for a long time and they tend not to be as technical as patents. Combining them could make the delay for pending lawsuits even longer. Looking at some statistics, there is a huge increase in patent lawsuits from 1,165 cases filed in 1990 to 5,163 filed in 2012, while the number of copyright and trademark cases filed increased from 2,095 to 3,074 and from 2,410 to 3,400 respectively. The total number of patent cases filed in US each year, will soon be more than the sum of copyright and trademark cases together.
Sources:
http://patentlyo.com/patent/2014/02/disjunction-litigation-copyright.html
http://www.uscourts.gov/uscourts/Statistics/JudicialFactsAndFigures/2012/Table407.pdf
It is interesting to find out that this is due to the different Courts for patent, copyright and trademark infringements. Even though they are all infringement of intellectual property, they are managed by different government offices. This is, as the author Dennis Crouch said, odd. There could be some generality that could be applied for the different forms of infringement, but due to the different courts, there will be different rulings for similar cases. A collaboration between the two courts could also lead to faster cases.
Still, with the large number of patent lawsuits that are ongoing, it probably would be good to separately classify them. Copyright and trademarks have been around and well known by the community for a long time and they tend not to be as technical as patents. Combining them could make the delay for pending lawsuits even longer. Looking at some statistics, there is a huge increase in patent lawsuits from 1,165 cases filed in 1990 to 5,163 filed in 2012, while the number of copyright and trademark cases filed increased from 2,095 to 3,074 and from 2,410 to 3,400 respectively. The total number of patent cases filed in US each year, will soon be more than the sum of copyright and trademark cases together.
Sources:
http://patentlyo.com/patent/2014/02/disjunction-litigation-copyright.html
http://www.uscourts.gov/uscourts/Statistics/JudicialFactsAndFigures/2012/Table407.pdf
I agree with Mr. Crouch's opinion that it's odd how different systems handle copyright, trademark and patent infringements. Although it is true that they are all different forms of IP and therefore cannot be fully lumped together, it still doesn't seem to make sense that patents, the new guys on the block, are separated out. This is especially true with software, who many feel like should be copyrighted instead of patented. I think there need to be either better boundaries between these various forms, or a more universal system should be created.
ReplyDeleteWhy do you think many feel that software should be copyrighted?
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