5. Conclusions
In this research, the MFCA generic methodology is developed for evolution analysis of IP litigations. The mobile technology legal cases and the disputed patents are used as case examples. The research clusters the cases into five groups while each group contains a set of common disputed patents with similar subtechnologies. The evolution paths of the clustered lawsuits are systematically related to a portfolio of the disputed patents. The two-layer MFCA illustration shows the group-wise evolution paths of both lawsuits and disputed patents. Further, the evolutionary linkages of disputed patents are divided into three periods, namely the early 3G development era, the matured 3G era, and the new 4G era. Over time, there are changes in the technological processes and legal activities as discovered through the case analysis.
This research in the realm of computer-assisted IP litigation and patent analysis is critically important due to the increasing complexity, high volume documents, and high legal cost for IPR litigations. There are huge numbers of related cases and patent documents associated with each litigation case. The data and text analysis is overwhelming for companies of limited IP, R&D resources, and legal budgets to face the market challenges. Although the computer-assisted e-discovery approaches still require legal expertise to validate and verify the analytical results to alleviate the risk of making wrong judgement, the computer-assisted system can certainly serve as a strong decision supporting tool for IPR protections and legal actions [39]. Further, there are other research, such as AmberScope, focusing on patent citation analysis for similarity analysis. Instead of investigating citation linkages among patents, this research focus on investigating the patent and litigation linkages, as a complementary decision support method.
Overall, this research provides a systematic and computersupported process to analyze the evolution trends of the litigation cases, the patents in dispute, and the competitors' similar patents for efficiently and effectively directing R&D and IPR strategies. The methodology presented in this paper is demonstrated using the 4G case but can be applied to other domains.
