Study Suggests Individuals and Startups More Likely to Face Invalidly under Alice

To the surprise of Lemley and Zyontz, their study uncovered a striking disparate treatment in the way federal courts handle patent eligibility matters based on entity size, with startup companies doing poorly when it comes to Alice-related patent eligibility matters, and individual inventors doing even worse. Their abstract summarizes their findings thusly: “Most surprisingly we find that the entities most likely to lose their patents at this stage are not patent trolls but individual inventors and inventor-started companies,” Lemley and Zyontz write. “As biotech worries about deterrence of new innovation and software worries about patent trolls dominate the debates, we may be ignoring some of the most important effects of Alice.”

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