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.""

Comments

Yes

[comm3c]

Bureocracy can't find stuff? Whats new.

FP!

Re:Yes

[free space]

someone should invent a way to find those top ten ( and then patent it!)

Re:Yes

[terranwannabe]

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"

Re:Yes

[frdmfghtr]

I wonder if they tried Googling for them yet :)

Re:Yes

[lgftsa]

In this case I think it's a good thing. Of the three people he specifically mentions, he insults and belittles two of them. Whoever the top ten are, they must be pretty relieved right about now.

Re:Yes

[Acts of Attrition]

"100 different ways to make a flower pot." Why must that be belittled? I know tons of people people who'd love to know how to turn flowers into pot.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re:Yes

[lbrandy]

My personal experiences with the patent office has been nothing but excellent. I hold two, one in chemistry and one in analog electronics. Most people on this forum "believe" the system is broken because that's what they hear continiously. And while there are certainly problems, anecdotal evidence isn't sufficiently indicitive of systematic failure. The Patent Office has one of the most unenviable positions possible, and yes it is often easier to grant borderline patents and let the courts handle it later (since, technically speaking, the argument goes that it's cheaper to litigate the .001% of borderline patents granted, then litigate 100% of the borderline patents not granted)... that doesn't make it right... but expecting an organization like that to be able to be perfect is just ridiculous.

The Patent people that I dealt with were -very- competant and -very- effective. It's a shame that the tiniest fraction of mostly trivial stuff gets 99% of the press.. I guess that's life.

Re:Yes

[dtfinch]

Until I find a better one, perhaps one of my favorite patents is #6,341,372, desribing a "Universal machine translator of arbitrary languages", able to make perfect translations in real time with zero knowledge of either language, like on Star Trek. It goes on to talk about such translaters being used by androids powered by perpetual motion. The rest is just chapters upon chapters full of philosophical ranting about existance, quantum physics, and the universe, maybe pasted from another source. Filed in 1997, granted in 2002. I came across this patent while searching to see how many "perpetual motion" patents the USPTO has granted so far.

Re:Yes

[montyzooooma]

The USPTO doesn't help itself when they consider patenting storylines and other makebelieve. Originally you were meant to have a working model before you would be granted a patent but now it seems possible to patent a "concept" and hold other people to ransom with it.

Re:Yes

[OohAhh]

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.

Re:Yes

[internewt]

The rest is just chapters upon chapters full of philosophical ranting about existance, quantum physics, and the universe, maybe pasted from another source.

It does look like the text is from elsewhere. I skipped through the text of the patent, just to see if it is all solid ramblings, and spotted the below in the section titled "DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE PREFERRED EMBODIMENTS"

Aware of its existence, the android perceives and changes the same reality of human corporal experience, including the reality of the cosmos. This book, an introduction to the theory and science of androids, is intended to acquaint the reader with this new technological finding and to mark the beginning of an androidal age in which sentient machines alter the human universe.[My emphasis]

So it looks to me like this patent wasn't even fully read before being granted, though it looks to be about 12000 words!

Local zoo...

[__aaclcg7560]

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.

Re:Local zoo...

[Yahweh Doesn't Exist]

you only need an infinite number to guarantee you recreate the works of Shakespear. in reality, so long as you're willing to wait longer, you can get away with a finite number of monkeys (a single monkey working for an infinite amount of time works too).

generally, you can recreate Hamlet in about 3 months with a team of 10 monkeys working 8 hours a day.

Re:Local zoo...

[ozmanjusri]

Can I see?

Yup.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/

Re:Local zoo...

[arodland]

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.

Re:Local zoo...

[raoul666]

Easy. You have an infinite number of monkeys reading it.

Same name problem

[ReformedExCon]

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.

Some Database

[IAmTheDave]

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?

Re:Some Database

[HunterZ]

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?

Well, you see, I patented both of those ideas already and am refusing to let the patent office use them ;)

so sad...

[Rabid_Llama]

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.

Re:hmmm

[mabinogi]

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.

does anyone else find it fascinating...

[__aasmho4525]

(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

What's frightening about all this...

[Niraj59]

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.

Re:What's frightening about all this...

[playit12]

Once more with proper formatting:

Whatever PTO examiners don't know about standard practice is dwarfed by what Slashdotters don't know about Patent Law.

First, as has been explaned numerous times before, each patent is reviewed by someone with training in that select field. For example, a patent for an LCD is reviewed by someone that has reviewed LCD patents, often for as long as LCDs have existed. It's quite common for these specialized examiners to be as adept in the field as any inventor working in that same field. This isn't surprising considering that those examiners will be reading some 1000 or more pages related to the field every day in their searches.

Second, the claims define the patented subject matter. Without sufficient legal background it's impossible to understand the meets and bounds (legal protection) of the claims. Reading out patent titles or parts of the specification is useless to understanding the legal ramifications of the patent itself. There is a reason why nearly all cases brought before the office are by lawyers representing inventors and not by the inventors themselves.

Third, it is in the best interest of the inventor (most of all) to allow good patents. Bad patents cannot be enforced in a court of law and are therefor not valuable to the inventor. As the filing fees for a patent often exceed several thousand dollars (and attorney fees are even more), people who pursue bad patents only harm themselves.

Fourth, just because you have a patent doesn't mean you can use it. A patent on some random element of a flower pot is only useful in that third parties find it useful and without an alternative, and the patent will be upheld upon extensive review by other attorneys.

Lawyers understand the quality of the USPTO far better than the average public. The USPTO is a favorite selection for PCT (Internationally filed Patents) searches primarily because they offer the best quality search and examination in the world today. Here no patent is awarded, and the sole goal is to find the best, most relevant art before filing nationally in other coutries.

Of course, feel free to ingore this or mod it down so you can continue to sound ignorant to those that have bothered to understand the details of Patent Law.

Typical - the PTO doesn't care about the inventors

[Savantissimo]

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.

"A database operator's nightmare"

[I Like Pudding]

Here, let me jump on this mighty grenade for the PTO:

select user_id, num_patents from (
  select
    u.id user_id, count(p.id) num_patents
  from
    patents p, users u
  where
    u.id = p.user_id
    and p.status in ('APPROVED', 'ACTIVE', 'QUITE SILLY')
  group by
    u.id
  order by
    num_patents desc
) where rowcount < 11

To whom do I send my bill?

Re:"A database operator's nightmare"

[back_pages]

Here, let me jump on this mighty grenade for the PTO:

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?

PATENT APPLICATION #1588003

[dirtsurfer]

Summary: A system for calculating the top 10 US patent holders.

USPTO Does Bathos

[Quirk]

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.

"an obscure guy in Japan who makes stuff..."

[Riktov]

"...most people can't comprehend."

You mean this stuff?

Re:hmmm

[samkass]

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.

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_05 _Scorecard.pdf

The (sort of) correct list.

[Jerry Coffin]

As I read this, /. was displaying a fortune cookie that alluded to 42 as the meaning of life. A rather interesting coincidence, since I suspect the original questioner didn't really think through and understand the question very well. For example, if one person is the secondary inventor on three patents, while another is the primary inventor on two patents, which is the more prolific inventor?

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:

1. Shunpei Yamazaki: 744
2. Donald E. Weder: 702
3. Kia Silverbrook: 602
4. Mark I. Gardner: 344
5. Salman Akram: 321
6. Warren M. Farnworth: 280
7. Ravi Kumar Arimilli: 269
8. Leonard Forbes: 238
9. Jay S. Walker: 223
10. Jennifer L. Hillman: 222

Nicely enough, all of these names even look like ones that stand a reasonable possibility of being unique (among patenting inventors).

Re:U.S. of A.

[Pantero Blanco]

"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.

USPTO should offer patents like grants

[SEGT]

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.

Patents bad for USA

[argoff]

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

Re:hmmm

[shreevatsa]

But the author of this article, despite looking for top patent holders, still makes snickering remarks about those he found:

Ravi Arimilli is IBM's top patent holder, with more than 300 patents. He's a researcher, based in Austin, who specializes in computer chip innards. Arimilli's most recent patent, issued Nov. 29, is for "Layered local cache with lower level cache optimizing allocation mechanism." He must be great at cocktail parties.

What's with the last sentence? If he's looking for those with a large number of patents, the ones he finds are bound to be from some very specialized field, and the names of the patents will be obscure to everyone else but those in the field. (OK, OK, I'm sorry; my sense of humour has returned, ignore the previous sentence.)

The hip thing to do...

[thebdj]

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).