Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Legal Commentary Blogs -> LawPundit

Legal Commentary

: LawPundit

Because of Failure to Pay Patent Maintenance Fees, more than 50% of 1997 Patents Already Expired

By Andis Kaulins

Patent Maintenance Fee Data at the Patent Law Blog (Patently-O) shows that over 50% of patents expire due to failure to pay maintenance fees. See Patent Maintenance Fee Data.

Though not stated at that source, one can surmise that one reason for this is that patents are filed in the hope of exploiting them for money-making purposes, but that many patents filed are not commercially viable, so that it does not pay to fork out the high maintenance fees down the road when it turns out that a patent is not making enough money for the patent holder to justify further expense.

It would be interesting to determine what percentage of patents filed are ever actually "asserted".

It would also be interesting to study patent maintenance as a function of the commercial size of the patent holder and to group the non-maintained patents by subject matter.

Full post as published by LawPundit on June 08, 2010 (boomark / email).