Litigation Against Counterfeits Stayed Lower in Q1 as Courts Continued to Impose Limits

RPX’s latest quarterly report shows that litigation from operating company plaintiffs increased by 35% in Q1 2026 compared to the first quarter last year. Operating company filings last quarter were also 5% lower than in Q4 but beat the trailing Q1 2023-2025 average by 33%.

However, these data above leave out another distinct category of litigation filed by a small group of design and utility patent owners targeting copycats and counterfeiters selling products online. RPX excludes such “e-seller” cases from analyses of district court litigation because they tend to follow a different dynamic compared to what one might consider the usual patent suit. These e-seller cases sometimes name hundreds of defendant entities, many of which may be merely online storefronts or aliases for the same ultimate parent. Also, plaintiffs primarily seek injunctive relief instead of damages, and their cases often end with the e-seller defendant’s failure to answer, followed by a default judgment.

This category of litigation is shown in grey below to illustrate its magnitude. As shown by the rightmost bar, e-seller litigation in Q1 2026 accounted for 1,096 defendants added, or 57% of all litigation during the quarter. As was also the case in Q3 and Q4 2025, this represents a much lower volume of e-seller litigation than in recent quarters past. While the lower counts for the past three quarters are still subject to the caveat about defendants potentially having multiple online storefronts, as noted above, the decrease could also be related to efforts by some judges to apply stricter procedural rules to e-seller cases, as last addressed in RPX’s Q4 in Review: In the Northern District of Illinois, by far the top venue for such litigation, District Judge John F. Kness issued an August 2025 order that criticized the “deluge” of such litigation, finding that these cases stretch the bounds of procedural rules “past their breaking point”. Because these cases routinely award preliminary injunctive relief without adversarial proceedings, involve widespread sealing, and rely upon improper mass joinder of defendants, Judge Kness held that the plaintiffs here should instead obtain the relief sought “by other means”.

The following month, District of New Jersey Chief Judge Renée Marie Bumb followed suit, issuing an order requiring e-seller plaintiffs to specifically and plausibly allege personal jurisdiction, including the contacts of each named defendant with the forum—stating that “[t]he law is well-settled that simply being an online seller on Amazon isn’t enough”. The order also limits each e-seller complaint to a “single defendant or group of defendants acting under the same operator”.

E-seller litigation also saw a further setback in the Eastern District of Texas this past quarter: On March 9, District Judge J. Campbell Barker held that for such cases asserting infringement of utility patents, plaintiffs cannot seek ex parte temporary restraining orders to ask a court to freeze the assets of accused infringers—which plaintiffs typically attempt to ensure that defendants cannot shift their funds in order to avoid liability. Judge Barker ruled that such a remedy exceeds the equitable authority of federal courts, explaining that the remedies for utility patent infringement are “strictly legal” and do not include “disgorgement and accounting”.

See RPX’s first-quarter review for more on some of the top patent litigation trends last quarter.