Slashdot Mirror
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.""
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"
If I have not seen as far as others, it was because giants were standing on my shoulders. --Hal Abelson
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.
According to the article IBM is the #1 company - but they were looking for individuals.
Personally I'd be suprised it Microsoft made the top 100, they've not been around for as long as the heavyweights, and their field has been fairly limited until recently.
Advanced users are users too!
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
"We try to be its policeman and end up with egg on our faces for the last 40+ years."
So South Korea and Kuwait could've won their freedom from oppressors on their own, and all the nations under Soviet control in eastern Europe (whose elected leaders all mysteriously died at the same time) were nice and happy? Taiwan and China could come to a peaceable understanding?
I agree with a lot of your criticisms about modern America, but I think your absolutist view of its involvement in the past half-century is a bit short-sighted. Its reputation isn't squeaky clean (ie, Lumumba in Congo), but there have been some genuine righteous triumphs as well.
I think that the Internet has shown us that there's a real flipside to the Infinite Monkeys Theorem. Given enough monkeys and enough time, you will indeed produce Hamlet or whatever other worthwhile thing you were after. But how the hell will you know when you've got it?
See also: Slashdot, blogs, Google.
I know you're trying to be funny, but your suggestion would be inadequate.
There's no analogy to a "user_id" for issued patents. There's no requirement that an inventor record his name the same way (James Doe vs. Jim Doe) and there are more than a handful of foreign language inventors who change the English spelling over time. There's also the issue of joint inventorship. You invent a powerswitch that makes electric tools more efficient and file 3 applications: with Steve the electric drill inventor, with Tim the electric saw inventor, and with Bill the electric belt sander inventor. You also file an additional application with William (who happens to be Bill) for an electric rotary sander. You have invented one powerswitch, but your name shows up on 4 patent applications (with 3 different people). People get married, omit middle names, omit "Jr." and more.
And finally, seriously, who the feck cares who has the most inventions? Who really thinks the patent office needs to assemble a team? Get right on this? Grab this bull by the horns? It's hard to imagine a more frivolous outrage.
I know you were just cracking a joke, but eh. The patent office has a public search facility. Stop by if you're in Alexandria VA. I happen to be somewhat familiar with what they've got in their database and why it's not so simple to answer this question. If you want to know how many times a particular name appears on a patent it would be simple to produce, but that is not the same question as who has made the most inventions.
This is analogous to the difference between what the spec says and what the customer wants. You build the product to the spec but that wasn't what the customer wanted. I'd think that this should be a familiar concept on Slashdot, but suddenly everyone is so shocked by precisely the same phenomenon. Honestly I think the patent office should have just patronized the guy and told him whose name appears on the most patents. It wouldn't come remotely close to actually answering the question about who has the most inventions, but who the feck cares?
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
Of course you feel the USPTO did a good job, you got what you wanted. Now what if in fact they were initially right and you were wrong? What if they simply allowed themselves to be persuaded by inadequate arguments in order to save time and get the application processed? It's easy enough to be happy with a system that gives you exactly what you want, but that isn't evidence that it's working.
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."