Anticounterfeit Litigation Accounted for a Sizable Share of Patent Assertion Activity in Q1
June 22, 2022
RPX’s latest quarterly report includes an analysis of patent litigation filed by operating companies—revealing that while such activity was up in Q1 2022 compared to a slow quarter one year ago, nearly all of that increase was attributable to a spike in litigation against generic drugmakers. However, that data also exclude a distinct category of litigation filed by a small group of design and utility patent owners targeting copycats and counterfeiters selling products online.
RPX excludes such “e-seller” cases from analyses of district court litigation because they tend to follow a different dynamic compared to a typical patent suit: These e-seller cases sometimes name hundreds of defendant entities, many of which may be merely online storefronts for the same ultimate parent. Additionally, plaintiffs mainly seek injunctive relief instead of damages, and their cases often end with the e-seller defendant’s failure to answer, followed by a default judgment.
This category of litigation, which began to spike in Q3 2020, is shown in grey below to illustrate its magnitude. As shown in grey on the right, e-seller litigation accounted for more than 45% of all defendants added in the first quarter (though that count is subject to the caveat about defendants with multiple online storefronts noted above).
See RPX’s first-quarter review for more on this and other trends impacting patent litigation and the patent marketplace.
