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China Now Top Patent Filer
smitty777 writes "China has passed the U.S. as the number-one filer of patents this year, according to a report by Thompson Reuters. With an average annual increase of 16.7%, China has filed 314,000 patents last year. This brings the total share of China in worldwide holdings up from 54% to 58%. However, according to legal expert Elliot Papageorgiou: 'One thing is volume, quality is quite another. The return, or the percentage of grants, of the patents is still not as high in China as, say, in the U.S., Japan or some places in Europe.' This was also a record year for patent filing over all, according to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). According to their numbers, worldwide patent applications are up 7.2%, at 1.98 million in 2010. FTA: 'WIPO Director General Francis Gurry on Tuesday attributed the rise to the "knowledge economy" and globalization led by U.S. and Chinese innovation.'"
Whopdeedoo.
Like most of China's academic papers these patents will also be worthless garbage.
They're complaining about the quality of Chinese patents?
I suppose bias against Chinese-originated patents could stifle this... but I suppose they will just create shell companies to work around that.
Is it where companies hoard patents on irrelevant things and use them to sue the pants off competitors?
companies are winning lawsuits on "clicking a phone number in an email in order to dial the number" and "switching to an app while on the phone." companies would be mad not to try to patent every tiny user interface action, technical revision, bugfix, etc. regardless of prior art or novelty. prediction, 2012 will be even bigger!!!
hopefully the us gets an incentive to fix the patent system. China is as entitled to patents as any other country... but the fact that the usa does not want to be deadlocked by china may give an incentive to fix the patent system :)
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
Fixed that for you
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Because those companies with a butt load a patents - ibm, microsoft, apple - are not american companies?
"One thing is volume, quality is quite another..."
Right. 'Cause, ya know, the U.S.A. cranks-out quality patents all day.
its 54%, not %54
get a brain morans
If anything, I would think that granting a higher percentage of patents is a sign of lower quality.
But then again, I also don't see more patents as a rise in the "knowledge economy" or globalization lead by innovation.
Have you tried turning it off and on again?
>"China has passed the US as the number one filer of patents this year"
Yes, but are they REAL patents or stupid, unfair, poor-quality software "concept" patents that have totally clogged the US system?
Not for years. They are very much multinationals - for instance IBM has a lot of staff in China working remotely on systems that are not in China.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson, in his talk at last years TAM, showed us a world map that illustrated the number of new scientific research papers filed by country. In 2000, the U.S. was still a leader. Then he showed the 2008 map, and the U.S. looked like a deflated balloon. My comment at the time was that primary research shows you applied research ten years down the road, and industrial innovation 20 years down the road. Guess I was right.
Tyson's point was that the Bush administration's defunding of pure science was reflected in the map. Much as libertarians don't like to hear this, private research goes into low hanging fruit. Primary research is too risky, particularly since, if done right, it enters the public domain. Only a handful of companies do this (IBM and Google, take a bow--Apple and Microsoft, sit down.) Medical advances are particularly susceptible to this. The computer revolution came from NASA and the Apollo project, the internet came from DARPA funding of AT&T for the creation of resilient network (those same Bell labs are now beggars at the table of Alcatel, a French company.)
Every other country that is a major player is spending a lot on primary research, and this funding is coming from the government. It's infrastructure, it lays the road for the business of the future, and its the one area where the government excels. China is spending a fortune on this, and we've exported all of our know how to them already, When IBM farms out manufacturing to another country, they send their engineers there to teach the manufacturers exactly what to do, and many other companies do exactly the same thing. They know almost everything we know, but we don't know everything they know--not anymore.
The Greatest Generation, the people who grew up in the depression and fought the Axis, understood responsibility. They did a lot of things wrong, but they knew how to work together towards a better future, and our standard of living is the result of that. Can you imagine rubber and silk drives today? Americans couldn't even be bothered to pay higher taxes for Iraq and Afghanistan, even while they made noises about supporting the troops. It's time to grow up and carry not only our weight, but more than our weight, and pass a torch that burns brighter for our having held it. So the next time you hear the latest Fox demagogue complaining about taxes, and demanding lower taxes, imagine how his belly aching would have sounded in the 40's.
There is no such thing as an American company. Corporations are not physical entities, they have no national loyalty. They are not supporting any national economy. They are parasites that are only serving themselves. Any benefit to the host country is purely accidental.
I imagine they would still file US patents for research they develop in China. I bet a US patent would hold more weight in a US court than a Chinese patent
The % sign does not appear before the number. Please do not make me angry.
TFA is about US Patents applied for from China!!!!
True. But the reason why these people emmigrated to the US to do R&D in american companies is because the pay is better and this condition hasn't changed.
Or rather hasn't changed enough yet. I don't think there is any Chinese company who can rival IBM's R&D, or Intel's.
Can you actually read ?
He said foreign "researchers". Yes these are american companies. And how many american researchers do they have ?
Check your premises.
And higher taxes may increase revenue...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve
Economist Paul Pecorino presented a model in 1995 that predicted the peak of the Laffer curve occurred at tax rates around 65%.[12] A 1996 study by Y. Hsing of the United States economy between 1959 and 1991 placed the revenue-maximizing tax rate (the point at which another marginal tax rate increase would decrease tax revenue) between 32.67% and 35.21%.[13] A 1981 paper published in the Journal of Political Economy presented a model integrating empirical data that indicated that the point of maximum tax revenue in Sweden in the 1970s would have been 70%.[14] A recent paper by Trabandt and Uhlig of the NBER presented a model that predicted that the US and most European economies are on the left of the Laffer curve (in other words, that raising taxes would raise further revenue).[15] The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics reports that for academic studies, the mid-range for the revenue maximizing rate is around 70%.[16]
However, a study by Teather and Young of the conservative Adam Smith Institute using evidence from the Republic of Ireland has suggested that the optimal rate for capital gains tax, as opposed to income tax, may be around 20%, but this is at least partly due to savvy taxpayers holding onto assets in anticipation of tax rates being lowered in the future.[17] A 2007 study by the conservative think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, found that the revenue maximizing rate for corporate taxes in OECD countries was about 26%, down from about 34% in the 1980s.[18]
Wrong. Its about the number of patents filed in the China Patent Office vs United States Patent Office
Patents valid under the laws of one country may not be valid in another. Trying using wishy washy american software patents in europe
Except I'm not worried about bias, I'm thinking that if the Chinese get enough patents to lock the United States out of their own patent system that will be the state of affairs that finally sinks the whole software patent thing. If you have to send two bucks to China every time you write a Hello World program, maybe that will finally display just how broken the system is.
Once large corporate interests figure out that patents cost them more than they help them, that's when reform will suddenly become important. So GO CHINA and torpedo the whole thing! Best of luck to you guys.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Now that china has learned how to file obvious patents and make them sound kinda novel, will we have meaningful patent reform?
What your mind creates should not be anyone's property, not even your own. If you want complete control over your ideas and creations, keep them to yourself. Once knowledge is out, it's out, you do not own it, and neither do I.
Yes, quality counts in academic papers, but .. crappiness counts in patents.
Yes, crappiness mildly obstructs obtaining the patent, fine file more patents. Yet, crappiness is an incredible asset once you obtaing the patent, but the more overboard, the more people you can sue.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Most of their patents probably originated here anyway. They were most likely stolen off U.S. computers from the thousands of companies that they hacked into. I wouldn't issue a Chinese patent in the U.S. until I did a background check on what company they stole it from. I'm also wondering how much longer we are going to put up with this crap.
How many of these are patents that were filed in other countries than China that are now being filed in China by the Chinese? i.e. not new design / research / etc but grabbing the rights to such 'inside' China.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
Maybe patents should be made harder to get. Obvious, right? With millions of patents being added every year and hundreds of millions already in effect, the system has become so convoluted that the little man inventor, the only person supposedly benefiting from a relatively cheap patenting process, doesn't stand a chance of enforcing his patent or even being sure that it's valid. Charge a million dollars for patents and use the money to buy health insurance for families, or cat food for sickly hedgehogs or something equally worthy.