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At EFF, we believe that all the rights we have in the offline world–to speak freely, create culture, play games, build things and do business–must hold up in the digital world, as well.
EFF’s longstanding project of fighting for a more balanced, just patent system has always borne free expression in mind. And patent trolls, who simply use intellectual property (IP) rights to extract money from others, continue to be a barrier to people who want to freely innovate, or even just use technology.
Defending IPR
The inter partes review (IPR) process that Congress created about a decade ago is far from perfect, and we’ve supported a few ideas that would make it stronger. But overall, IPR has been a big step forward for limiting the damage of wrongly granted patents. Thousands of patent claims have been canceled through this process, which uses specialized administrative judges and is considerably faster and less expensive than federal courts.
And IPR does no harm to legitimate patent holders. In fact, it only affects a tiny proportion of patents at all. In fiscal year 2023, there were 392 patents that were partially invalidated, and 133 patents that were fully invalidated. That’s out of a universe of an estimated 3.8 million “live” patents, according to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO) own data.
Patent examiners have less than 20 hours, on average, to go through the entire review process for a particular patent application. The process ends with the patent applicant getting a limited monopoly from the government–a monopoly right that’s now given out more than 300,000 times per year. It only makes sense to have some type of post-grant review system to
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