*A companion write-up for the animated chart of Intel's patent-litigation adversaries, 1983–2026.*

# What you're looking at

Each bar is one year. Its height is the number of **distinct adversaries** Intel faced in new patent/trademark-infringement suits that year, split by type:

* **Companies**: operating businesses (have a real brand/logo)
* **NPEs**: non-practicing entities, a.k.a. "patent trolls": entities that don't make products and exist to assert patents
* **Individuals**: named people (inventors, pro-se litigants)

Across 1983–2026 that's **219 adversary-year appearances** from **170 distinct adversaries**.

# The headline findings

**1. Intel is overwhelmingly a target, not an aggressor.** Of the cases analyzed, Intel was the **defendant 205 times** and the **plaintiff only 28**. It gets sued \~7× more often than it sues.

**2. The nature of the attacker flipped.** Patent trolls went from a clear minority to the majority of Intel's opponents:

|Era|NPE share of adversaries|
|:-|:-|
|1983–1999|14% (5 of 35)|
|2000–2009|56% (31 of 55)|
|2010–2026|53% (69 of 129)|

In the 1980s–90s Intel's fights were with **real chip companies** (AMD, Cyrix, Chips & Technologies, Hyundai). From the 2000s on, litigation became a **toll**: entities that build nothing collecting from a company that builds everything.

**3. The busiest years are recent.** The peak for *new* distinct adversaries in a single year is **2020 (13)**, followed by 2010 (12). But the more telling metric is the **active caseload** — lawsuits actually open in a given year (new + earlier ones not yet closed). That climbs relentlessly and peaks at **30 simultaneous active cases in 2022**, staying in the 25–30 range across the modern era. The siege never really lets up.

# The data source

All data comes from the **Unified Patents litigation database** (`portal.unifiedpatents.com`), which aggregates U.S. patent/trademark infringement dockets across District Courts, the Federal Circuit (CAFC), the ITC, the Court of Federal Claims, and the Supreme Court. The records cover cause of action, parties (plaintiff/defendant), filing date, current status, **termination date**, court, judge, and industry.

# How it was collected

A Python crawler queries Unified Patents' public Elasticsearch endpoint directly (no scraping of the rendered UI), paginating through every infringement-type case. For each case it pulls: filing date, **closed/termination date**, status, plaintiff(s), defendant(s), cause of action, court, judge, and an industry tag. The full pull is \~74,000 cases; this analysis filters to those where **Intel** is a party (word-boundary match, so "Intel" doesn't catch "Intellectual Ventures").

# How it was processed

1. **Name cleaning** — strip legal suffixes (Inc, Corp, LLC, …), parentheticals, and "v." artifacts; title-case; so "Intel Corporation" and "INTEL CORP." collapse to one entity.
2. **Adversary = opposite side.** For each Intel case, the adversaries are the parties on the *other* side (plaintiffs if Intel is defendant, defendants if Intel is plaintiff). Co-defendants in a troll's mass-suit are **not** counted as adversaries of each other.
3. **De-duplication:**  adversaries are counted once per year (the bar height is distinct adversaries, not raw filings).
4. **Type classification**: *Individuals* via a name heuristic (titles, initials, an explicit list); *Companies* if a brand logo could be sourced; everything else without a logo is treated as an *NPE*. (This is a heuristic, not a legal determination — see caveats.)
5. **Active caseload**: using real **filing and termination dates**, a case counts as "active" in every year between its filing year and its close year (open cases run to the present). This is what makes the burden metric meaningful rather than just counting new filings.

# Caveats (read these)

* **Filings, not outcomes.** The data records that a suit was filed; it does **not** encode who won, settled, or paid. No verdict is inferred.
* **NPE labeling is heuristic.** "NPE" here means "no operating-company logo found + not an obvious individual." It approximates the patent-troll category but will misclassify some edge cases.
* **Docket numbers aren't unique** across courts/years, so cases are de-duplicated by content, not by docket alone.
* **Counts ≠ materiality.** A landmark billion-dollar case (e.g., VLSI) counts the same as a trivial one.

# Tools

Python (pandas, numpy, matplotlib) for processing and the animation; the Unified Patents Elasticsearch API for data; company logos from logo.dev, Wikidata (P154), and the USPTO trademark database.

[OC] Four decades of Intel in the patent courts: data, method, and what it shows