The UK Intellectual Property Office has just released various bits of information sought by individuals under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and which were supplied in May 2012. One such request related to patent litigation. Like any other government department, the IPO is obliged to give honest and accurate answers, but doesn't have to spend much in terms of effort and resources in order to get those answers. Accordingly, responses to FOI requests often have a sort of do-it-yourself flavour. Anyway, the IPO's entry on its website looks like
this:
Subject: Patent litigation statistics
Date of response: 3 May 2012
Summary of request:
I would like to learn how to obtain UK patent litigation statistics, such as annual median
damages award. It would be excellent if the statistics shows which cases were lost profit
awards and which cases were reasonable royalties, and so on.
Response:
The costs awarded by the Hearing Officer are not recorded by us anywhere other than in the
decisions themselves, which can be viewed on our website under the heading 'Results of past
patent decisions' (see http://www.ipo.gov.uk/p-challenge-decision-results.htm).
If you use the keyword search function and search for costs you will find all the decisions
where we have awarded costs. We are not sure what you mean by the terms 'lost profit' or
'reasonable royalties'; perhaps you will be able to tell from looking at them.
We do not hold data on costs awarded at the courts. You could try the Patents Court in the
first instance (see http://www.justice.gov.uk/courts/rcj-rolls-building/patents-court).
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