The numbers may be bleak when viewed in isolation, but taken as a percentage of all active patents, the number of patents asserted in lawsuits have been remarka

The numbers may be bleak when viewed in isolation, but taken as a percentage of all active patents, the number of patents asserted in lawsuits have been remarkably constant. The more recent spike, as you surmised, can be attributed to the AIA joinder rules. You may worry that the spike in number of active patents is unhealthy, but again, there are studies that indicate that this is due to increased innovation than just over-patenting: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=556630 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=556630 As for number of patents getting "screwed over", that is a very difficult metric to measure, simply because "screwed over" is ill-defined. If you can define "screwed over" I might be able to find a paper that tries to measure that. (Seriously, SSRN appears to a number of papers on all kinds of crazy topics.) The Katznelson paper is not about just software and patents. By "historic" rates, the paper means revolutions in technology similar to those wrought by the computer revolution. Similar litigation rates have been observed in the past when major new technologies were introduced, such as radio and microelectronics. They are not the same thing technically, but the potential for new applications that these new technologies introduced is similar.