Today, on national Manufacturing Day (MFG Day), let’s band together and urge Congress to push forward legislation that codifies fair practices at the PTAB, including guaranteed access to inter partes review (IPR), to protect manufacturers against abusive patent litigation. Unfortunately, patent trolls continue to prey on and threaten these hard-working job creators and innovators.
The financial threat trolls pose to manufacturers is significant. The median cost of taking patent litigation to trial – even for a small company with $1,000,000 to $10,000,000 at risk from the litigation – is about $1.9 million dollars per patent. With a typical time to trial of 2.1 years, these defendants face around $900,000 per year in legal fees. Because 91.5% of U.S. manufacturing facilities employ 99 people or less, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and the average annual cost per job for these small-to-medium size manufacturers is $81,710, more than 10 percent of a manufacturing company’s employees could lose out on work every year that their employer is involved in often-frivolous patent litigation.
This Manufacturing Day, let’s not just celebrate manufacturers; let’s help to protect them from predatory patent trolls.