Add PTAB, TTAB, and ITC decisions

[mlissner]

Headline

Free Law Project adds [huge-number] of decisions from the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), Trademark Trial and Appeal Board, and International Trade Commission (USITC)

What is the Feature?

This would add patent related litigation to our case law database and would keep it up to date with ongoing data collection.

This is a slight divergence from our current practice of collecting almost exclusively 3rd branch content, but we do collect Attorney General decisions now, so it's not crazy.

This could fit into our jurisdiction picker in the "More" tab, where we have Military, Tribal, Historical, and Misc. courts:

What Problem Might it Solve?

This would further round out our collection of data.

Describe a Scenario in Which the Feature Might be Used

One user reports:

I am a solo practitioner, and my practice is limited primarily to patent and trade secret legal matters.

For attorneys like this, these decisions could be useful.

Technical Requirements

• What would it require that we do technically?

  This would require a new scraper for ongoing and historical updates and some minor changes in the UI. It could involve adding new fields to the DB, which would add some complexity.

• How hard is it to make, subjectively? Medium. I don't think there are that many cases, and the scrapers shouldn't be that hard to make.

• Best guess, how long would it take to make, roughly?

  Three weeks.

Existing Systems or Alternatives?

More research is needed here, but so far I know Docket Alarm has this, and I believe you can search the gov't website as well.

[anseljh]

Selected cases from all 3 of these bodies are published in a Bloomberg/BNA reporter called U.S.P.Q. (now U.S.P.Q.2d). I can fill people in on the TTAB.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Patents_Quarterly?wprov=sfti1#See_also

[mlissner]

Got an email related to this today:

I am writing to inquire about a specific service that provides specific details on US District court and ITC patent litigation cases. I am specifically interested in obtaining information on:

1. Looking for plaintiff and defendant counsel information (which includes all the attorney names, law firm name, and email address [if and when these details are available based on update in the docket])
2. Case docket number and names of both the parties
3. Patents involved in litigation.
4. Any additional relevant case details that would be included in such a subscription.

We are hoping that such details would be shared in form of alerts on daily basis i.e. any cases filed previously but where any defendant counsel is updated today in any case, we'd be notified via alerts tomorrow with all those cases and corresponding info. Could you please let us know if you can provide such specific subscription that would grant access to this data, including any trial periods. If yes, please provide pricing details, and the process.

I asked them how much this was worth to them.

I added a new discussion to think about extracting patent numbers: #43

[anseljh]

Given all the talk about tariffs lately, we may want to bump USITC ahead in the roadmap. Tariff and dumping cases are within their ambit—not just IP cases.

The Commission investigates and makes determinations in proceedings involving imports claimed to injure a domestic industry or violate U.S. intellectual property rights; provides independent analysis and information on tariffs, trade and competitiveness; and maintains the U.S. tariff schedule.
—About the USITC

They publish a list of active import injury investigations.

The patent people are interested in their other adjudication area, which is unfair imports (Section 337). These investigations can be about any form of IP (not only patents) or antitrust. The goal is to get an exclusion order preventing the import of offending goods.

The USITC's cases (they call them "investigations") and documents are available through an online system called EDIS that has both RSS feeds and an XML-y API.

This body is different enough that it's probably worth dividing any work from the USPTO's PTAB and TTAB.

That said, it will be valuable if we can connect USTIC, PTAB/TTAB, and District Court cases to each other and to the underlying IP rights. Sometimes patents especially are being litigated in two or three of these places simultaneously, and a body will stay their case while the another finishes its work.

[mlissner]

Got another request for ITC today. They sent the user Web Service User Guide:

edis_data_web_service_guide.pdf

[anseljh]

With Replit, I just made an absurd amount of progress on downloading and parsing bulk data on TTAB decisions. Still plenty of work to be done, but... 👀👀👀👀
https://github.com/anseljh/ttab-parser

[anseljh]

The USPTO's TTAB Reading Room is a good source for TTAB opinions going back to the end of 1986, and is quite crawlable. The documents are direct from the USPTO -- no apparent proprietary publisher content from the spot checks I've done.

Here's a pretty gnarly scan of a 1987 opinion. The current ones are much more legible!

[anseljh]

And I've submitted a FOIA request to the USPTO for any mapping they have of TTAB and PTAB cases to USPQ / USPQ2d citations: https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/mapping-of-ttab-and-ptab-opinions-to-united-states-patents-quarterly-citations-206309/

[anseljh]

Related contributions:

• Inaccurate regex for CCPA courts-db#125
• Add USPTO administrative bodies courts-db#126
• Add 'USPQ2d' variant reporters-db#247
• Add Trademark Trial and Appeal Board scraper juriscraper#1851