About 10 years ago an inventor was told by a contingency litigation firm that his then patent applications were ‘a pig in a poke’ and that the firm had no interest in taking on assertion as no patent had yet issued. Today the situation is quite different. Today even after a patent issues the inventor still has nothing tangible. For example, according to the PWC 2017 Patent Litigation Study inventors have only a 3% chance of winning through appeal. Even then on the rare occasion we do win the CAFC bashes the daylights out of our damages so that we end up walking away with only a moral ‘victory’ at best. With those odds and results contingency firms would rather we instead literally brought them something in a sack.
That explains why small entity issued patents (and filed applications) have sunk to only about 10% of their historical share, if not less and still falling. Yet small entities create the lion’s share of new jobs in America. That then explains why America can’t find a good paying full time job and why our college graduates can’t find jobs in their fields of study and are forced to take low wage and part time jobs…if they can find any. Is the American dream dead?
Meanwhile, large multinational infringers are sending more and more American jobs overseas. When they can’t export jobs they import workers that displace Americans. For inventors and many other Americans our patent system and with it the hope of good paying full time jobs are now a pig in a poke.
American Inventors for Justice 