We kicked off 2018 with a post on the Eastern District of Texas’ amended rules. In that post, we revisited TC Heartland and its potential impact in the new year. We continue the ongoing conversation by briefly looking back at a noteworthy TC Heartland amicus brief.

Per a 2016 Patenly-O report by Dennis Crouch, Associate Professor, University of Missouri School of Law, that year, a group of 50+ law and economics professors had “a professional interest in seeing patent law develop in a way that encourages innovation and creativity as efficiently as possible.”

The academic group asserted that the Federal Circuit’s permissive rule had fundamentally shaped the patent litigation landscape in harmful ways, specifically “by enabling extensive forum shopping and forum selling, supporting opportunistic patent litigation by patent trolls, and creating undue case concentration.”  

The group also stated that “because of the Federal Circuit’s dubious interpretation of the statute plays an outsized and detrimental role, both legally and economically, in the patent system,” the court should grant certiorari to review the meaning of 28 U.S.C. § 1400(b) and prevent abuse.