“Litigation continues until the weaker party runs out of money to continue the fight”
It has become a vastly larger problem since Obama signed the America Invents Act that created the PTAB and IPRs.
Obama is very closely tied to Silicon Valley and the big tech firms who wanted this bill, in order to further their strategy of ‘Efficient Infringement’- a fancy way of saying “let’s steal the patents of small firms because they’ll die before the courts force us to pay”.
IPRs permit a nearly endless string of challenges to your patents, and that can be done by parties that would have no standing in court- such as hedge funds that are shorting your stock, which benefit by means of using the PTAB to cost the patent owners a fortune in defending their patents against the very USPTO that granted it.
The PTAB has none of the protections offered by an Article III court. They can pick “judges” who were employees of the firms challenging your patent, they can stack the panel to get the outcome that the head of the PTAB wants, they can deny you the ability to offer evidence, to appeal. It’s something that Kafka would recognize.