Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Bush appointed conservative, business oriented judges and these judges were much more willing to find patents valid and to award or allow juries to award damages which sometimes wrecked or made companies. The Golden Age of Patents arrived. The Supreme Court did its part, strongly affirming the CAFC view that almost everything was patentable. Software, which hitherto wasn't important at all in the patent world, assumed paramount importance, and as Biotechnology burst on the scene, patents were the only effective way to secure value for these discoveries, which were incredibly expensive to make and develop. While this was playing out, international trade also exploded in volume and it was Japan which lead the explosion.
Japan is the most pro-patent country on earth, at least in numbers.
Japanese companies love to get patents, although Japanese have never accepted the present American attitude that patents can and should determine whether a company rises or falls. In the 1960s Japanese companies were filing a few hundred patent applications a year in the United States. Finally, it began to dawn on American companies that their best weapon against competitors abroad, particularly in the Far East, was in their U.S. patent portfolio. Drag a Japanese company into a U.S. District Court and have its fate decided by an American jury taking time off from their job at Ford, and you have a recipe for adding significantly to the bottom line and making foreigners think long and hard before copying U.S. innovations. The way was brilliantly led by Texas Instruments and Hal Cooper of Jones, Day who extracted hundreds of millions of dollars from all the Japanese and Korean semiconductor manufacturers, and kept TI profitable through the tough 1980s.