“Apple Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. were the most frequent targets of U.S. patent-infringement lawsuits last year in an increasingly complex legal climate that Congress and the Supreme Court are being asked to control,” Susan Decker reports for Bloomberg.
“Of the 6,092 patent-infringement suits filed, 10 companies — all patent-licensing firms — were responsible for almost 13 percent, according to a report today from Lex Machina, a Menlo Park, California-based legal analysis company,” Decker reports. “Three of those companies filed more than 100 lawsuits each.”
“In a filing with the Supreme Court, Apple said that for every case that reaches court, it gets dozens of letters demanding royalties. The number of demand letters being sent out by patent owners is unknown, and hotly debated, with a White House report last year estimating that more than 100,000 companies were threatened in 2012,” Decker reports. “Congress is considering proposals that would require patent owners to make clear who really controls the patent, put on hold lawsuits against the users of technology in favor of suits involving the manufacturers, and mandate that the loser in a patent case pay the winner’s legal fees except in limited circumstances.”
Read more in the full article here.
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