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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!
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.
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!
(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
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
Summary: A system for calculating the top 10 US patent holders.
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
"...most people can't comprehend."
You mean this stuff?
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.
"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.
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
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
OK, I'll patent this instead... your one has flaws ;)
SELECT name, address, count(*) FROM patents HAVING count(*) > 1000 GROUP BY name, address;
You know what helps when you file a patent even if it isn't innovative? Having a patent lawyer.
...can you guess?
What does Microsoft have a lot of?
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
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
Don't, you're absolutely right. I'm sure the guy who trawls through patents counting up who filed them is a hit with da laydeez too, the nut.
Oh, I thought a corporation was better than a person in the eyes of the law. Silly me. Oh well, at least I wasn't alone in thiking this, seems most corporations agree.
Unlike copyrights, under the current law, patents are awarded to flesh and blood heart beating individuals and not corporations. Corporations can be assigned a patent but cannot be credited for inventing stuff. In fact failure to name all relevant inventors in a patent application may result in an invalidated patent years down the line.
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.
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."
The patent office operates under a "good faith and candor" policy. They need to see a name and a signature. If you're committing fraud, it's your problem and the patent, if it issues, would be unenforceable. So it's up to you, Mr. James Theodore Doe, to prove that you are actually the Ted Doe identified in the patent if you try to sue someone with it.
Under what authority would the patent office investigate situations of fraud? They're the patent office, not the patent & signature analysis & investigative forensics office. It's up to the courts to figure out.
I presume a common method of asserting that you're the inventor would be showing all the papers you've filed with your attorney and evidence of paying attorney fees in connection with the patent application.
.. 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.
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.
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!