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USPTO Unable to Find Top Ten Patent Holders
lelitsch writes "So a journalist tries to interview the top ten patent holders in the US. As he finds out, neither the USPTO, nor the patent processing companies are able to identify them. Even more surprisingly, "America's greatest inventor is apparently an obscure guy in Japan who makes stuff most people can't comprehend. And the nation's greatest native inventor seems to be a man who has come up with 100 different ways to make a flower pot.""
Bureocracy can't find stuff? Whats new.
FP!
I would have thought microsoft would of been near the top.
If the monkey house at the local zoo can produce Shakespearian writers, imagine what they can do for patent applications! I'm sure they will have different ideas about getting the peanut out of the shell -- or designing flower pots.
Lots of people with the same name in that database.
Kind of like the Nobel prize a couple years ago where there were a bunch of people with the same name in the research department of the winner in Japan.
For those that didn't read the article, USPTO is bad and grants too many broad patents to obvious and common things.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
If they can't do a quick query to see who owns the most patents, is it so very odd that they can't do a simple search and find prior art for the patents they grant today?
Excuse my speling.
Making The Bar Project
The thing is, anyone can get a patent. Much like the flower pot guy, quantity of patents does not necessarily mean that the person is the best inventor. Perhaps a better topic would have been the top 10 most productive or innovative inventors. Dean Kamen gets my vote on both.
I'm kind of surprised that RIM isn't in the top ten...
(and maybe a little depressing) that in so many parts of our (western) culture, we value quantity over quality?
to wit:
"And the nation's greatest native inventor seems to be a man who has come up with 100 different ways to make a flower pot."
the nation's greatest inventor, in my mind, would be the inventor that has most positively impacted society at large with their inventions, etc, etc. basically, a totally subjective unit-of-measure unless we find some nice way of ranking the value of a given patent to society...
it's just curious how often this happens....
(large houses over well constructed houses, etc, etc, etc).
enjoy.
Peter
"Big business is now in control of our [US] government?"
If something this simple is this easily hidden, very bad things are happening at very high levels of our government.
Be very afraid of corporate control of your civil liberties.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
After reading the article I got to thinking about the controversy surrounding the subjective assessment of a patent. When does a patent become too general? When does it go from covering an invention to covering something that is convention?
I think it's especially terrifying in the computer world because it seems that many USPTO employees don't know what is standard practice and what is innovation. This article from Salon reviews some ridiculous patents and patent claims
Generally subjectivity plays a small role in governmental organizations (think about the IRS and all its coded forms). It seems that the USPTO is a strange organization in that sense. Does anyone know how the process works? To me it seems as if it's just reviewed by a bunch of people who may or may not understand what it is their awarding a patent to.
they can query their records to find a patented way to solve the problem....oh wait
It really shows the orientation and priorities of the system when the PTO can can instantly find a list of the top-patent-assignment-receiving companies, but go 9 years between looks at who the top inventors are. It shouldn't be that difficult for any decent database to handle, after all, despite what that jounalist was told.
The system needs to be recast to benefit the inventors and society, not the horrible corporate givaway currently being plotted in Congress under the guise of patent reform.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
Maybe well see a report on 20/20 and some public complaining about the stupidity of the system. I mean, "everyday people" can understand these issues. Yes, even law and politics are all about marketing.
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
Summary: A system for calculating the top 10 US patent holders.
Man, is Ravi Arimilli ever going to be in for a nasty surprise when SCO sues him over their patent for a "Layered local cache with lower level cache optimizing allocation mechanism."
Well some guy at Amazon is probably raising their hands.
--After all this years I can't still believe it. ONE click? gahhhd.
bathos: bathos - a change from a serious subject to a disappointing one
It's great to see slapstick humour is thriving in the U.S.
In highschool myself and a few friends made a habit of getting together to watch comedic silent films. The films were available from libraries and the venerable National Film Board of Canada.
Generally our favourites were Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton.
While I fear and loath (in the best intentioned way of the late H.S. Thomson) the policies of America as applied to IP, the USPTO has taken to mimicing Chaplin's indifferent giant machine crunching the common person in the truest, sadly comedic, bathotic fashion. Unfortunately I'm afraid act two has been foredone by Kafka.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
Are we really, as most of us imagine ourselves, the leaders of innovation in the world? Or are we its entertainment center? We try to be its policeman and end up with egg on our faces for the last 40+ years. We're certainly getting good at being the consumers, with 25% of the world's produce consumed by us, and our wealth flying out over the ocean, much of it never to return. We're an oligarchy of megacorps too, big business is stacking the decks in its favor at the expense of our rights and our ability to express our political will. We used to scorn the communist nations as a place where the individual was nothing and the state everything, now for us its all about Uncle Sam and big business.
"...most people can't comprehend."
You mean this stuff?
I thought the patent office kept their records with crayon.
I think the government needs to train those that apply patents to be more discriminating so less general patents are approved. Perhaps they should set up a more advanced sytem of applying patents with more people approving it then before so if one person makes a mistake and applies a terrible patent consumers don't suffer the consequences
We want you to join th Linux user community
So, I'm going to restrict the question a little bit. First of all, I'm only going to look at the primary inventor on any given patent. Second, I'm going to ignore the fact that not every name on earth uniquely identifies an individual person. Finally, for the sake of letting my computer get back to more important things like folding protiens, I'm only going to look at about the last 10 years worth of patents (and in fairness, I haven't updated my database for the last few months either, so it's possible the last couple might have changed since then -- and it's quite possible all of these numbers are now a bit higher). Finally, I'm restricting this to US Utility patents, not plant patents, design patents, etc.
Within those guidelines, the top 10 inventors and number of patents credited to each are:
Nicely enough, all of these names even look like ones that stand a reasonable possibility of being unique (among patenting inventors).
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
From the Article: "In 2002 alone, Arimilli won 78 patents. That's three patents every two weeks. Either he's a wonder-dude who makes the rest of us look like slugs, or his name winds up on a lot of work done by teams of people."
I doubt it's the result of either being a wonder dude, or teams of people, and more likely the guy patents random obvious crap that has no business being patented in the first place. Just like 99% of all the other 'inventions' that are patented.
Now I've seen Everything
Usually when someone posts a silly patent to a site like slashdot, the community finds prior art in minutes. Why not open these up to public discussion, have people sign affadavits or whatever, and let the community do the work?
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
No wonder Weder isn't answering the phone. To be brought out of the closet so publicly must be a humiliating experience.
That many patents for flower pots and flower arranging devices could only mean one thing right?..
I recently got setup to apply for a grant from NIDA and thought if patents were treated in a similar manner we might be better off. To get accepted your application goes to a board of individuals who are physicians. They are still working in their respective fields and understand what is innovative in the medical field and what is not. They determine if your grant goes through. Think, "what if patents were treated this way?" You enter your patent in a category and it is accepted/denied by those who are knowledgable in the field. They will be able to tell if you are patenting the obvious.
10: SIN 20: GOTO HELL
You think that's bad? Patent examiners here can't even search by the EFFECTIVE dates of patents. Seems like that should be the bare minimum, right? Sure, you can search by filing date, but that doesn't take into account foreign priority.
*BA-bum* Thank you, I'll be here 'til Thursday.
OK, I'll patent this instead... your one has flaws ;)
SELECT name, address, count(*) FROM patents HAVING count(*) > 1000 GROUP BY name, address;
You got modded offtopic! Know what that means? Someone who has been waving the flag like a good little nazi and regurgitating every pro-corporate thing they hear on talk radio finally got some mod points. And you struck a nerve with your exaggerated and inflammatory but largely true statements.
From TFA:
It doesn't seem unusual to have a foreigner holding so many patents. Of the top 10 living patent holders on the 1997 list, eight were from other countries. Six were Germans, and two were Japanese. The only two Americans were flower guy Weder and oil industry researcher Hartley Owen.
The point is that no matter how much royalities the USA gets from the rest of the world, the rest of the world is still 20 times bigger than the USA. I think when push comes to shove, the US insistence of coercing patents is a very evil idea and will one day come back to haunt us in a very painfull and violent way.
essay:A Violent Protest Against Patents
100 different ways to make a flower pot... and they are all patented. And this shocks you why? Everybody and their dog knows that the US patent system is grossly broken. If you think that 100 different flower pots are grotesque, you should look into the patents held by Microsoft and NTL (the guys that are going to rape RIM-blackberry.) Slight hint: They are not the worst cases.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Does anyone have a Mac?
You should remember that most patents are assigned to the employer of the inventor(s). A patent application needs to list as the inventor(s) real people, not companies, but the assignee is the one that gets the benefit of the patent. That's why it's less important, from the PTO's perspective -- the inventor is not usually the stakeholder when a patent is challenged or enforced.
Is it time to overhaul the US patent system yet?
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
OK, I'll patent this instead... your one has flaws ;)
SELECT name, address, count(*) FROM patents HAVING count(*) > 1000 GROUP BY name, address;
But wait! Yours has flaws too!
SELECT applicant.name, applicant.address, count(*) AS count
FROM patents, applicant, applicantmap
WHERE patent.id=applicantmap.patent_id
AND applicantmap.applicant_id=applicant.id
GROUP BY applicant.name, applicant.address
ORDER BY count(*) DESC LIMIT 10;
How many patents are going to have just ONE name on them? Most have several, and the name of the applicant really should be properly normalized, and since we really don't know how many people are going to be on a patent application, we really should create a many to many mapping...
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
I find it very disturbing the USPTO cannot uniquely identify patent holders... If they cannot uniquely identify patent holders, then how can the USPTO (or courts) *identify* patent holders???
How many people named "John Doe" (Chris Smith, John Williams, etc) own patents?
Now how to do they show ownership of the patent (e.g. in an infringement case)? Sure, they probably got a nice little notorized certificate... but surely a piece of stamped paper cannot be the only proof!
Seems like an IP company could just hire a few people with really common names (at least common in the Patent database)... Then they could have all sorts of fun by suing everyone else for infringment... Yes, this would be perjury, but for the other side to prove their "John Doe" is not the same "John Doe" on the patent might be a bit tough....
You know, as it can take anywhere from 6 months to 10 years for a patent application to get filed and all, you have to wonder exactly how efficient the USPTO really is... I know the government isn't famous for picking up their feet, but with todays computer technology, you'd think that of anyone, the USPTO would have it down to (ahem), a science.
Its only illegal if you don't get caught
Well, I recommend a so called search engine in this so called internet, e.g. www. google.com. Just enter "top ten patent holders" and here they are.
Such postings really make me think whether the complete position of the anti-patent-community is as illogical as this thread.
This is what I call "the Wikipedia effect", due to that community's emphasis on quantities such as edit count as an indicator of merit. The person with the greatest number of patents is not necessarily "the greatest inventor". There are plenty of people with few but very significant inventions. There are also people that don't patent everything they invent.
"Most prolific" is more accurate, but the article seems to use the two interchangably.
Actually, if you'd ever seen the Microsoft campus, you'd know that while they don't have roses, they do have some of the most beautiful landscaping around. I can say with complete confidence that the MSN division is totally spoiled when it comes to the landscaping around their buildings, though.
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
It may take time for a finite number of monkeys to generate the works of Shakespeare, but an infinite number of monkeys can do it on the first key press. They will also have generated every other work in existence. After all, it's an infinite number of monkeys, so if they all push just one random key on an infinite number of typewriters, you now have a text of length infinity... in its contents are the entire works of mankind.
stuff |
I'll tell you why USPTO fails to do this in their database: Sheer incompetence, disinterest and short-sightedness
I mean, they receieve money and have a customer-relationship with the patent applicants. With a little thought in advance, you could have built a normalized database that accounted for this. But I guess they aren't really interested in anything else than pushing through as many patents they can a year, to receieve more money. Are you really telling me USPTO doesn't really know WHO owns the thousands of patents? They are not a friggin' store, they are a government agency.
Patronize the guy asking uncomfortable questions? The whole post/article is tongue-in-cheek. HE's the one setting THEM up! I thought it was obvious, especially after the pot-joke.
Or that guy who patented a way of swinging sideways on a playground swing...
I'm not going to go and actually dig up the patent right now, but basically he patented (or did it as a proxy for his kid, I hope) a method of moving oneself sideways on a swing by pulling alternately on the supporting chains. As someone who spent a good bit of my youth hanging around playgrounds, there's a lot of prior art on that one.
(Of course, personally I was always partial to swinging in an ellipsoidal fashion, by moving forwards and back and then pulling on alternately on the chains, the better to whack the person in the swing next to you.)
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
is to insult the USPTO at every possible junction, especially around here. There are several problems with searching for the most prolific inventor and the reason largely lies in the complexity of the search. First off, the database was built a long time ago and at that time a great many inventions (probably in the millions or at least hundreds of thousands) had already come through the US Patent Office. Now, in order to figure out if each person was a separate individual from the other people sharing that name you would have to research each patent and attempt to contact as many people as possible to find out if they were the same. This is just to get the unique IDs for the first database.
Let us assume that you started from that point on creating unique IDs for every individual, instead of the aforementioned problem a new one that previously existed is still there. A person can have a multitude of possible names. Say my name was James Robert Smith. What if I filed for patents using different forms of my name over time? James Robert, Jim Robert, Jim Bob (hey I had to pick a name with a funny variant), maybe just James or just Jim, or just Robert or Rob or Bob, how about J.R. or J.B., or Jim Rob, James Rob...I think you get my point. Not to mention my name might be VERY common. I doubt many people in the US could argue that Smith is an uncommon last name, the same goes for the name James or Robert. Now you have to determine if it is the same person.
On a printed patent your next means of division would be by city and state. Of course this does not take into account if our James Robert Smith moved around or if multiple James Robert Smith's exist in the same city and state. This is a rather complex search that is not as easy to perform as some individuals might have you believe. After all, it wasn't just the PTO who said we cannot do it, of course I shouldn't expect people to RTFA.
In defense of prior art search, these relatively simpler to perform. You would search for a general concept or a component of an item claimed in the patent. The primary database would include prior patents, patent publications, and patents from other countries. A vast majority of individuals around slashdot will often point out prior art that is outside these realms, and while individuals within the patent office will search outside as well, the ability to find prior art is much more limited without databases properly setup for accurate searching. Even if examiner X finds a reference to application Z through a Google search, they still have to then show that reference A was published or known before the filing date of application Z.
I could quite possibly spend all day trying to defend the PTO; however, it would most likely be a waste of my time. Instead of complaining the PTO does not do its job and constantly making what sound like personal attacks at the individuals who work there (without ever knowing who they are), file for a patent, work at the office, or litigate a patent as an attorney or agent (if you can get past that pesky exam) before you judge the job the individuals are doing. I think you will all find that the people working at the patent office work hard to ensure that the best quality they can produce goes into every patent application they work on and that these people deserve better then to have their intelligence or integrity questioned by people who do not fully understand how the system works (afterall the office quite possibly collects much more in fees for a longer prosecution then for a quick allowance).
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
If you take an infinite supply of rednecks, with an infinite supply of pickup trucks, and an infinite supply of shotguns & an infinite supply of shotgun shells, confronting an infinite supply of "Share the Road" bikepath signs, then eventually all the world's great works of literature will be written...
IIRC, companies like Microsoft and IBM are not patent "holders," they're "assignees." The actual inventors, who are real persons and not corporate entities, are who the journalist in the article was searching for. in the process of filing a patent, most inventors assign it to the company they were working for when they did the inventing, but they are still listed as the inventor and it is to them that the patent is granted. After being assigned the patent, the company then basically owns it under law, and can use it as they wish. However if you went searching for most prolific patent-holders, I think what you'd get back would not contain any corporations, but only individuals.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Just because you throw infinity at something doesn't mean you'll eventually get the value you want.
;).
Some X-Y functions just have Y approach a particular value (say K) as X goes to infinity, but you never get Y=K.
Proving that an infinite number of monkeys will _definitely_ produce the works of Shakespeare is not that simple.
Especially your statement that they can do it on their first key press.
After all there's a chance that they could all just press the spacebar for their first keypress
But what if not a single monkey presses the letter 'e'? "To b or not to b that is th qustion"
The article is just silly fluff. The "inventor" doesn't matter all that much to the USPTO. They focus on validity of claims, etc.. One thing they do keep good track of, and for good reason, is who is the assignee or "owner" of each issued patent.
I'll put money on Canon being near the top. They seem to have a blanket policy of patenting everything no matter how trivial.
While it's interesting to see what people have had the most patent applications approved, I think that it's more useful to see who has patents that are then referenced by other patents. This provides a measure of which inventor are working in an area where there is a lot of activity.
Bonus points will be given to anyone who then filters out patents that reference previous patents from the same inventor.
.. never less. This is because there is an ever growing number of patents to search through every time someome is applying for a patent. Searching for patents is not enough, you actually have to read them as well to figure out whether it constitutes prior art.
Even if you reduced the number of years a patent is valid, you still need to record them forever, in case someone tries to patent them again.
The only thing that could stop the patent system from becoming more and more expensive, is that the techniques for searching through and reading the patents improve at a faster rate than the number of patents.
Otherwise, one of three things will happen:
1. The patent system will eventually become so expensive that only the extremely wealthy companies can patent things. This will typically mean the end of competition.
2. The patent office will just let more and more bogus patents through to be sorted out by the legal system. This will also mean the end of competition as the most wealthy companies can sue any competitor to the ground.
3. Someone in power sees the madness and dismantles the patent system.
Someone might say that 1. and 2. have both already happened.
They have 728 people at the USPTO processing over a million patents a year. Figure in toilet breaks and vacation and that means they've got less than an hour TOTAL to spend on each patent -- soup-to-nuts as they say. That's not enough time to read the application, look up prior art, and judge the patentability of something; they know it and we know it. So, as it is now they spend more time on things that might raise a stink if it goes through, and rubber stamp anything that seems to silly to be worth agonizing over. Now, where are they supposed to fit in fielding questions from the press? Maybe the reporter should ask the GAO... Someday they are bound to look at the USPTO and they could probably get that data for you...
It's possible that this guy is simply recording all those patents (which they mail out a CD biweekly) and applying for the same items in the US.
generally, you can recreate Hamlet in about 3 months with a team of 10 monkeys working 8 hours a day.
On the off chance you're serious, I disagree. There's one simulation on the web for infinite monkeys trying to write Shakespeare and the current record is 28 letters. Also, lacking a cite, but Slashdot at one point ran an article tracking an actual case of trying to get monkeys to write Shakespeare by introducing a computer into a cage. Mainly the monkeys smeared feces on it, but otherwise, they had a decidedly non-random tendency to type the same letter over and over again.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
I didn't think so.
As I recall, Microsoft has never been near the top on a per-year basis, so they have no chance of being at the top overall.
I have no opinion about whether MS is near the top of the list by number of patents held, but your logic doesn't hold water. They could easily be #15 in the list each year, and yet be the top in the list overall. All that is required is that #s 1-14 (everyone above them) to change every year. So if MS is granted half as many patents as the #1 patent grantee each year for 10 years, but everyone above MS in that annual list changes each year, MS can easily be #1 over the 10 year period.
In the meantime, feel free to continue your naive perspective in which the wonderful patent system not only doesn't ever impede progress, never hurts inventors, doesn't retard products from making it to market, and never sets scientific research back by decades, all the while enriching all of us equally according to the merit of our cleverness. Oh, what a wonderful system it is!
In TFA, they mentioned something like 7 million records in 5 years. 7 million records isn't that many when you've got modern hardware working for you. Even considering bad db design, you can still normalize it somewhat. My company consults on worse data (and more of it) fairly routinely and we've developed (tho not patented) some pretty good methods for these types of problems. We even have private sector companies that can't figure it out. This isn't rocket science, why can't we get an answer? Someone kindly get me the db, and i'll have answers for you.
I wonder how many patents that Anonymous Coward guy has. He's pretty prolific around here.
"Stop throwing the Constitution in my face! It's just a goddamned piece of paper!" -- George W. Bush
p.s.
what are these "civil liberties" of which you speak?
Do you actually know why patent applications are published 18 months after filing? Think about it!
No, you misunderstand. This is a bit of that Matrixy stuff leaking out. The patent wasn't granted by a "real" person, it was inserted into the granted patent list by those in the real "real world". Don't worry, though, those androids will come along and make everything copasetic. The patent will disappear, everything referencing it will disappear, and everyone's memory will be erased except for the few the real "real worlders" decide to get to first.
Or something like that...
Two things come to mind:
1. In B5 where the emperor washes his hands of G'Kar's blood and sprinkles the bloody water over some flowers.
2. Sweet violets, covered all over with roses, covered all over from head to toe, covered all over with roses.
oh really....
The PTO recieves quite a few job applications a year. It is a very desireable place to work at due to its benefits, pay and flexible work schedule (if on maxiflex shceudle you can work 80 hours every biweek pretty much any way you want). The vast majority of people do not start as a GS-5 step one. Having a decent GPA, at least a year of work experience, a masters degree and the like result in starting as a gs-5 step 10 or a gs-7-11. Your first promotion is available in 6 months, subsequent promotions are available 1 year from that date. In 4-5 years you make nearly 100k if you start as a gs 5 or 7. There are plenty of bonus's available, and you can work paid overtime and comp time.
The PTO hase absolutely no problems hiring people at all. In fact next year they are looking to hire about 800-1000 people. The main problem is retention.
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
Token rejections, hahaha that must be why I have a 6% allowance rate.
Also I think you need to be educated on the concept of hindsight (everything looks obvious in hindsight) and the differnces between the standard definition of obvious and the legal one. You can't look at a patent filed in 2001 with your 2005 knowledge, you have to somehow travel back in time interms of thought.
Further the previous poster had a point, you do need some sort of legal education in order to really understand the claim language. What are the differences between comprising, consisting, and conisting essentially of? When is the premable given patentable weight? When an applicant claims a value of "aproximately 10-25" where does the upper bound of the approximate value end? 26? If so why not 27? Why not then 28 and so forth.
Lastly, after looking at the same technology again and again for years, one begins to get a pretty good idea of what is well known out there and what is not.
examiners are under no pressure to allow, we get counts towards our quotas for abandonments and when the applicant elects to start the clock over again via a request for continued examination.
Perhaps the USPTO should post a slashdot story on the summary and first few claims of the patent, get everyones blood boiling, and then sit back as everyone digs up prior art for them.
Thanks,
Leabre