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

[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

[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

[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!

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.

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.

"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?

PATENT APPLICATION #1588003

[dirtsurfer]

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

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:Local zoo...

[raoul666]

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