The number of patents granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office dropped in fiscal year 2015 for the first time in seven years, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers’ annual patent litigation study released on Tuesday. The decline is likely a result of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2014 decision in Alice v. CLS Bank, which made it more difficult to obtain and assert software patents.
The PTO granted 322,448 patents in 2015, compared with 329,613 in 2014, according to the report’s authors. That’s a 2 percent drop.
Fewer new patents did not translate into a calmer litigation landscape, however. The median damages award for a patent case rose to $10.2 million, the largest level in 10 years. One verdict, Smartflash v. Apple, relating to media storage technology, resulted in a $533 million award.
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