Patent litigation by private inventors - case Finland

Abstract

Private inventors are active patent applicants but lack the skills to prosecute their IP rights. While patents and patenting are studied immensely in the last decades, we have found the role of private inventors less covered. Our research focuses on private individuals’ involvement in patent prosecutions in the Finnish courts of law. We study the actions of private inventors to protect and enforce their intellectual property, and the types of legal actions they get dragged into. This paper uses a literature review and patent litigation data retrieved from the Darts-IP database and combined with patenting data from the Finnish patent and trademark office (PTO). Based on a conducted analysis we find that private inventors have high success in patent ownership disputes and low success in administrative hearings. In other types of cases they fare about as well as corporate litigants. This is somewhat surprising, as private inventors are usually thought to perform poorly in patent litigations. Our research, to our knowledge for the first time, provides empirical evidence of private inventors’ involvement and performance in patent litigations, in Finland and provides new insights to technology and innovation management in the intersection of judicial research. The results of this work are useful for academia, as well as for private inventors, entrepreneurs and small company managers for making knowledge-based decisions on inventions, patents and patenting.