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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.""
You did catch on that the author was making fun the most prolific inventor, right? His use of 'greatest' was clearly ironic.
Does anyone else find it fascinating/depressing when people can't spot obvious humor?
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RumorsDaily
It should be:
"The nation's most prolific inventor, according to the USPTO and based on number of US patents, appears to be a man who has come up with 100 different ways to make a flower pot."
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
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 would be surprised if they ever broke the top-20 patenters on a per-year basis, let alone be even in the top-50 cumulative. (From my googling, they appear to have been in 29th place for last year.) Microsoft's reputation as an innovator was historically earned mostly in the marketing and sales arenas, not the technological one, although in recent years they've acquired a lot of talent. We'll see what they make of it in the future.
5 _Scorecard.pdf
IBM has been in first place for the last 12 years straight, is the only company ever to break 2,000 patents per year (in 2004 they got 3,277), and last year got about 2/3 more patents than the 2nd place finisher.
http://www.iptoday.com/pdf_current/Reports/Rprt_0
E pluribus unum
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.
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.
Yet more conclusive proof of the USPTO's utter incompetence, from the people who brought you "Contradictory Patents Teach Us To Get Along" and "Everyone's Got A Little Prior Art Sometimes, That Doesn't Mean We Go Around Invalidating Patents"
So interestingly enough one of my patents has just received its notice of allowability. On its first pass through though the patent office put up quite a few objections and rejections to our claims. After we went over them we found that about 20% were basically due to vague language on our part. The remaining 80% were flagged by the USPTO as already claimed, though in reality they were not related at all, and once we pointed this out the USPTO agreed and dropped their objections.
So I would have to say that my patent is now a much stronger one thanks to the feedback from the USPTO, and I was impressed by how wide of a net they cast in looking for precedent. Now of course I'm a hardware engineer, so perhaps they are stronger in this area. But in this one case I feel they did a good job.
- AC cause my legal team wouldn't even want me to say this much - Lawyers sheesh...