USPTO Patent Number and Case Code File Dataset Documentation

Researchers studying the U.S. patent litigation system have typically had to rely on proprietary, commercial databases to retrieve comprehensive lists of litigated patents and associated case information, precluding publication of underlying data and the verification of study results. In other situations, researchers have used incomplete datasets, potentially resulting in biased results. In order to overcome these limitations, the authors and their research teams reviewed every available initial complaint and related documents in roughly 99 percent of all patent cases filed in U.S. district courts between 2003 and 2016 in order to generate a comprehensive list of litigated patents in those cases. In addition, the authors and their teams coded the case “type” for all of these actions, such as infringement, declaratory judgment, false marking, ownership dispute, malpractice, among others. The resulting dataset can be downloaded in bulk and be used and reproduced with no licensing restrictions. These data have been married to USPTO’s Patent Litigation Docket Reports Dataset, which provides full case and docket information for every one of these cases. Thus, for the first time, researchers can now use a single, comprehensive dataset of patents, case types, and related case information to conduct empirical studies of patent litigation in the U.S. district courts.