Expansions in IPR protections increase the number of legal claims to enforce these rights

Other things constant, an expansion in intellectual property protection is likely to increase the number of legal claims that allege violations of these expanded rights. Thus, an increase in the legal protection of intellectual property should generate increased litigation in trademarks, copyrights, and patents. It is undisputed that intellectual property protection has grown in the last fifty years or so, particularly since the passage of the 1976 Copyright Act. In a recent paper, Richard Posner and I estimated the expansion in intellectual property rights by the increase in the number of words in the principal intellectual property statutes, because most of the statutes expand intellectual property rights—or create new ones—rather than reduce existing rights. In the 1946-2000 period, Posner and I estimated that the copyright statute increased by nearly eleven-fold (from 11,550 words in 1946 to 124,300 words in 2000); the patent statute increased by more than four-fold (from 24,565 words in 1946 to 110,880 in 2000); and the trademark statute (the Lanham Act) by more than two-fold (from 10, 640 words in 1946 to 24,750 words in 2000). This translates into a 4.4% annual rate of growth for the copyright statute, a 2.9% rate for the patent statute; and a 1.4% rate for the trademark statute. We also showed that these increases were not continuous, but typically coincided with major statutory changes, such as the new Copyright Act in 1976; the Trademark Revision Act in 1988, and amendments to the Copyright Act in 1998 concerning digital copying and the copyright term.