Half of US Patents Issued Out of US For Second Year

netbuzz writes "According to a new report from IFI Patent Intelligence, 51% of patents issued by the United States in 2009 went to companies located overseas. While this marks the second consecutive year that a majority of US patents have landed abroad, an author of the report says: 'It's foolhardy to use this statistic to infer that American firms are losing ground to foreign competitors because with patents, it's important to consider quality, as well as quantity.' IBM was once again granted the most patents of any company, 4,914, followed by Samsung and Microsoft."

Comments

The economic argument is getting worse

[H4x0r Jim Duggan]

I can only speak for the domain of software development, but there was a period from 1996-2008 when the USA was disproportionately feeling the rewards of software patenting. The rewards were always severly outweighed by the costs ($11 billion in 2008), but there were always people pointing at these rewards.

Now that the companies of the USA's economy will increasingly become the targets of software patents instead of the users, those rewards will diminishing.

Patent policy for other domains can be considered while only looking at the economic effects. For software, the social effects have to be considered too because software development is something that individuals can do and participate in - like writing a book, reporting news, or writing music. So, it makes sense to have economic studies to make our point, but we also have to remember to have other arguments and to point out that these other issues exist.

The good news is that there's the Bilski case which might solve the problem, and there are also initiatives in other countries, most notably Israel, New_Zealand, the EU, Australia, and something starting in . Help sought.