IP Litigation in US District Courts: 1994 to 2014, 101 Iowa Law Review 1065-1112 (2016)
This Article undertakes a broad-based empirical review of intellectualproperty (“IP”) litigation in U.S. federal district courts from 1994 to2014. Unlike the prior literature, this study analyzes federal copyright,patent, and trademark litigation trends as a unified whole. It undertakes asystematic analysis of the records of more than 190,000 cases filed infederal courts and examines the subject matter, geographical, and temporalvariation within federal IP litigation over the last two decades.This Article analyzes changes in the distribution of IP litigation overtime and their regional distribution. The key findings of this Article stemfrom an attempt to understand long-term patterns in the filing data as wellas short-term deviations from various trends. This data-driven approach hasyielded insights in relation to such diverse topics as Internet filesharinglitigation, the true impact of patent trolls on the level of patentlitigation, and the extent of forum shopping and forum selling patentlitigation. Just as importantly, this Article lays the foundation forplanning and evaluating future empirical studies of IP litigation with anarrower focus. Many of the results and conclusions herein demonstrate thedangers of basing empirical conclusions on narrow slices of data fromselected regions or selected time periods.