Universities and patent trolls: an Empirical Study of University Patent Infringement Litigation in the United States

Universities underwent a radical change of paradigm in the last forty years. Since Bayh-Dole Act in 1980, they have been accused of having a growing interest in revenue generation activities such as overzealous patenting, participation in patent auctions and morally doubtful patent enforcement. On the point, some prominent scholars argue that the litigation behavior of universities should be monitored, considering the possible similarity with the so-called patent trolls. Patent trolls are a kind of non-practicing entities (NPEs) whose core business is litigate patents with lower quality almost at the end of their life, trying to maximize their revenues at the expense of the potential plaintiffs. While the harms to innovation made by patent trolls are well-known, the involvement of universities in litigation has not been explored by the literature from an empirically point of view. In this work, we collect data on patents held by universities at the United States and Trademark Office (USPTO) and data on infringement lawsuits filed by universities in the years 1990-2019 to study the characteristics of the litigated patents. We find that universities litigate their patents only sporadically (less than 0.4% of their patents have been used in infringement proceedings) and when the patents are particularly valuable. Moreover, we analyse the fields in which universities litigate, considering that trolls mainly ravage in the ICT sector. Our conclusion supports the idea that universities participating in litigation is a growing phenomenon which should be monitored, but their current behavior does not reflect the strategies of the litigation NPEs. Further research is needed to consider the whole universities' portfolio to assess which patents they choose to litigate and the evolution of their strategies over time.