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zeeglen
It was about 12 years ago we were working with a patent attorney on a new ...
DrQuine
It may be misleading to say that "The economy doesn't appear to have slowed ...
U.S. patent awards up 31 percent in 2010
Rick Merritt
1/10/2011 1:24 AM EST
SAN JOSE, Calif. – The U.S. Patent Office awarded a record 219,614 patents in 2010, up 31 percent, the most significant annual increase on record. IBM continues to dominate the list with 5,896 patents, up 20 percent, while Apple, Qualcomm, NEC and General Motors showed the most growth overall.
"The economy doesn't appear to have slowed patent flow significantly in the U.S.,” said Darlene Slaughter, general manager of IFI Claims Patent Services which compiled the 2010 figures. “There is still a backlog of patents pending, but the number of grants continues to grow even after a period of economic downturn,” she said in a press statement.
The 31 percent annual increase in utility patent awards was the largest increase on record, according to IFI. IBM has held the lead on the list for 18 consecutive years.
Samsung came in second with 4,551 patents, up 26 percent. Microsoft was third at 3,094, up just 6.5 percent. All but one of the companies in the Top 50 saw increases, most shattering records and many posting double-digit percentage gains, IFI said.
Apple had the greatest growth, coming in at number 46 with 563 patents, up a whopping 94 percent. Qualcomm saw 84 percent growth, coming in at 41 with 657 patents.
NEC was close by with 74 percent growth at number 39 with 680 patents. GM saw 68 percent growth and was ranked 22 with 942 patents.
Silverbrook Research, a little known Sydney, Australia, R&D firm, ranked 34 with 752 patents, up 58 percent. It employs more than 500 workers in a broad range of fields from chip design, to software engineering, fluidics, network architecture, cryptography and imaging.
U.S. firms edged back into dominance on the list with 50.3 per cent of all patents. In 2009, U.S. firms only commanded a plurality of awards at 49 percent.
Japan ranked second at 21.3 percent. Korea was a distant third at 5.4 percent, closely followed by Germany (5.2 percent) and Taiwan (3.8 percent). Taiwan's biggest patent winner, Hon Hai Precision Industry Co Ltd, ranked 13 with 1,438 patents, up 44 percent.
Various high tech sectors ran neck-and-neck in their share of the patents. Multiplex communications got 3.3 percent of the total. Solid-state devices and transistors for 3.1 percent and semiconductors were ranked separately at 2.7 percent. Computers and biotechnology were tied at two percent of the total.
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eewiz
1/10/2011 7:59 AM EST
31% increase!! Now thats impressive. Anyone knows what was the growth rate last year & the year before? With lot of patent trolls on the move, companies have no choice but to file for every patent they possibly can. Guess it also shows US is still the intellectual capital of the world. BTW where are the china numbers? Or you dont count it because of lack of IP law enforcements?
~6K patents for IBM :)!! If I am not wrong they are focusing on services these days.
Then what to do with all these patents?
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antiquus
1/10/2011 12:16 PM EST
I think that more pertinent would be statistics about the acceptance/rejection rate. If acceptance is up 31% in real numbers, is this because more applications were input, or because the overwhelmed examiners rubber-stamp anything that has a new way of wording the proposition, and are rejecting a smaller percentage?
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Frank Eory
1/10/2011 5:28 PM EST
The USPTO did not increase the number of examiners by 31%, so most likely the existing examiners got a lot more efficient with that rubber stamp.
I hope I'm wrong. We already have one industry that got itself in lots of trouble for taking a robo-signing approach to important documents :)
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Sheetal.Pandey
1/10/2011 5:40 PM EST
well its a good news. To a great extent I also agree that US companies give great importance to research and patent studies. They have the best of everything in the world.
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selinz
1/10/2011 6:43 PM EST
wrt IBM patents, they still have a very large R&D arm. I suspect that more than 75% of those patents come from their R&D, a group that is undoubtedly graded on patents, among other things.
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chanj
1/10/2011 7:54 PM EST
Presumably, the patents can be turned into a prototype if they haven't turned into one. It's a good news to US corporations.
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docdivakar
1/14/2011 3:36 PM EST
@Rick Merritt: it would be interesting to know what % of the increase came from the so called greentech/cleantech patent applications which were given a fast track approval process.
@Frank Eory: USPTO did hire a number of positions in the late 2008 and early 2009 time frame to prep for the increase in greentech filings. It also outsources some of its work. Now a days, its examiners are also spread out at various locations in the US, working from home offices (not publicized much!).
Dr. MP Divakar
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DrQuine
1/15/2011 1:08 PM EST
It may be misleading to say that "The economy doesn't appear to have slowed patent flow significantly in the U.S.” Patents have a long lead time, the 31% increase in patents in 2010 reflect examiners completing reviews of patents that were filed years earlier. For example, my 4 issued patents in 2010 were the results of applications filed in August 2003, September 2005, August 2006, and December 2006.
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zeeglen
1/15/2011 3:07 PM EST
It was about 12 years ago we were working with a patent attorney on a new design. During a coffee break we got to discussing "frivolous patents". The attorney told us there were many such patents on things such as the purchasing algorithm for internet commerce. Once an entrepreneur (read "scam artist") obtained a patent on his purchase algorithm his next step was to con investors into financing his scheme, the sucker-bait being "I own the patent" and having the paperwork to prove it.
A few years later got hints that large corporations that could afford to patented every single little thing possible. Then they traded blocks of patents back and forth ("you can use our patents if we can use your patents").
Has anything really changed? Mind you, what I have said is as heard from others, I make no claim that these observations are based on fact.
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