Patent litigation precaution method: analyzing characteristics of US litigated and non-litigated patents from 1976 to 2010

This study aims to propose an early precaution method which allows predicting probability of patent infringement as well as evaluating patent value. To obtain the purposes, a large-scale analysis on both litigated patents and non-litigated patents issued between 1976 and 2010 by USPTO are conducted. The holistic scale analysis on the two types of patents (3,878,852 non-litigated patents and 31,992 litigated patents in total) issued by USPTO from 1976 to 2010 has not been conducted in literatures and need to be investigated to allow patent researchers to understand the overall picture of the USPTO patents. Also, by comparing characteristics of all litigated patents to that of non-litigated patents, a precaution method for patent litigation can be obtained. Both litigated patents and non-litigated patents are analyzed to understand the differences between the two types of patents in terms of different variables. It is found that there are statistically significant differences for the two types of patents in the following 11 variables: (1) No. of Assignee, (2) No. of Assignee Country, (3) No. of Inventor, (4) Inventor Country, (5) No. of Patent Reference, (6) No. of Patent Citation Received, (7) No. of IPC, (8) No. of UPC, (9) No. of Claim, (10) No. of Non-Patent Reference, and (11) No. of Foreign Reference. Finally, logistic regression is used for predicting the probability of occurrence of a patent litigation by fitting the 11 characteristics of 3,910,844 USPTO patents to a logistic function curve.     

Interactive overlay maps for US patent (USPTO) data based on International Patent Classification (IPC)

We report on the development of an interface to the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) that allows for the mapping of patent portfolios as overlays to basemaps constructed from citation relations among all patents contained in this database during the period 1976–2011. Both the interface and the data are in the public domain; the freeware programs VOSViewer and/or Pajek can be used for the visualization. These basemaps and overlays can be generated at both the 3-digit and 4-digit levels of the International Patent Classification (IPC) of the world intellectual property organization (WIPO). The basemaps can provide a stable mental framework for analysts to follow developments over searches for different years, which can be animated. The full flexibility of the advanced search engines of USPTO are available for generating sets of patents and/or patent applications which can thus be visualized and compared. This instrument allows for addressing questions about technological distance, diversity in portfolios, and animating the developments of both technologies and technological capacities of organizations over time.     

The Patent Asset Index – A new approach to benchmark patent portfolios

Patent metrics are increasingly used to assess the competitive position of technology-oriented firms. Patent rankings and patent scoreboards are popular methods to benchmark patent portfolios of firms against each other. Existing rankings, however, have methodological limitations that significantly reduce the meaningfulness of these benchmarks for managers, investors and other stakeholders. In this paper, we develop a new benchmarking methodology that overcomes limitations of existing approaches and offers a more accurate assessment of a firm’s patent portfolio vis-à-vis its competitors. Firms are ranked according to the Patent Asset Index, which is derived from a set of newly developed patent indicators. These indicators are empirically validated and reflect more accurately the value of patents. We apply the new benchmarking method in the global chemical industry and contrast our findings with those of other existing patent portfolio rankings.     

Identifying rapidly evolving technological trends for R&;D planning using SAO-based semantic patent networks

Patents constitute an up-to-date source of competitive intelligence in technological development; thus, patent analysis has been a vital tool for identifying technological trends. Patent citation analysis is easy to use, but fundamentally has two main limitations: (1) new patents tend to be less cited than old ones and may miss citations to contemporary patents; (2) citation-based analysis cannot be used for patents in databases which do not require citations. Naturally, citation-based analysis tends to underestimate the importance of new patents and may not work in rapidly-evolving industries in which technology life-cycles are shortening and new inventions are increasingly patented world-wide. As a remedy, this paper proposes a patent network based on semantic patent analysis using subject-action-object (SAO) structures. SAO structures represent the explicit relationships among components used in a patent, and are considered to represent key concepts of the patent or the expertise of the inventor. Based on the internal similarities between patents, the patent network provides the up-to-date status of a given technology. Furthermore, this paper suggests new indices to identify the technological importance of patents, the characteristics of patent clusters, and the technological capabilities of competitors. The proposed method is illustrated using patents related to synthesis of carbon nanotubes. We expect that the proposed procedure and analysis will be incorporated into technology planning processes to assist experts such as researchers and R&D policy makers in rapidly-evolving industries.     

Patent trend analysis: Incorporate current year data

Patent trend analysis, a statistical analysis of the rate of publication of patents pertaining to a certain field or assigned to a certain company, provides information about technology maturity and corporate technology strategies. Typically, the analysis is performed by counting in an online database the number of patents issued annually in a set of calendar years. This means that the analysis can only be performed up to the year for which all the patents have been captured in the database.In order to obtain a quantitative estimate of that lag time, we have analyzed the rate at which patents are being added to Derwent's World Patent Index database. We found that most patents issued in a given year are captured in the database by March of the following year. We also found that the rate of addition of patents to the database is a linear function of time. Not only does this allow completion of a patent trend analysis to the current date, it actually allows, under certain conditions, the extrapolation of the analysis to the end of the current year.     

Assessing the value of patent portfolios: an international country comparison

Patent counts have been extensionally used to measure the innovative capacities of countries. However, since economic values of patents may differ, simple patent counts may give misleading rankings, if the patents of one country are on average more valuable than those of another. In the literature several methods have been proposed, which shall adjust for these differences. However, often these do not possess a solid economic micro-foundation and therefore are often ad-hoc and arbitrary procedures. In this paper, we intend to present an adjustment method that is based on the analysis of renewal decisions. The method builds on the theoretical model used in Schankerman and Pakes (1986) and Besson (2008) but goes beyond both approaches in that it recovers the important long tail of the value distribution. It also transfers Besson’s (2008) econometric methodology (applicable to the organisational structures of the US Patent and Trademark Office) also to the European Patent Office which is necessary, since each application here may split up into several national patent documents. The analysis is performed for 22 countries. Exemplarily, we find that in the cohort of 1986 patent applications, Danish patents are about 60% more valuable than the average patent. German patents are a bit below average. Japanese patents are of least value. In the cohort of 1996, Danish patents lose some of their lead but are still more valuable than the average. While German are a bit above average, Japanese patents even fall further behind (possibly due to the economic downturn in since the mid of 1990ies).     

The technology assessment and forecast program of the United States patent and trademark office

Often overlooked is the wealth of information in patents that makes patents useful to public policy making agencies and corporate management, among others. The source of this information is the bibliographic and classification data associated with each patent. much of which is required by law and hence is extremely accurate. These data serve to fingerprint the increment of technological activity disclosed in a patent. Possible ways of using the data include: — identification of emerging technologies — Monotoring foreign activity — identification of “actors” in the technology — tracking applications and impacts of a technologyThe objective of the technology assessment and forecast program of the United States Patent and Trademark Office is to stimulate the use of the patent file of the Office. The Office of Technology Assessment and Forecast (OTAF), which administers the program has assembled a master data base covering all U.S. patents. It periodically updates this base and adds new data items to it.     

Measuring patent quality: A claim and search report approach

This paper presents a new prospective metric for assessing the novelty and inventiveness of patents. It does this by using initial patent search reports and examiner's intuition about the impact of adverse citations on patent claim survival. The paper then demonstrates the metric by evaluating the quality of Switzerland's national patent stock using a selection model, finding that between 84 and 90% of the country's national patents would likely not survive examination at the European Patent Office. In doing so, it contributes to the larger literature on patent assessment, underscores the relevance of patent strategy in the observed characteristics of patents, and removes some of the ambiguity in the academic literature about backward citations.     

An in-depth empirical analysis of patent citation counts using zero-inflated count data model: The case of KIST

Patent citation counts represent an aspect of patent quality and knowledge flow. Especially, citation data of US patents contain most valuable pieces of the information among other patents. This paper identifies the factors affecting patent citation counts using US patents belonging to Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST). For patent citation count model, zero-inflated models are announced to handle the excess zero data. For explanatory factors, research team characteristics, invention-specific characteristics, and geographical domain related characteristics are suggested. As results, the size of invention and the degree of dependence upon Japanese technological domain significantly affect patent citation counts of KIST.     

Patents,Competition, and Firms’ Innovation Incentives

This paper presents fresh evidence on the interaction between industrial property rights (patents) and competition, and their joint effect on firms’ innovation. We use panel data of Spanish manufacturing firms for 1990–2006, as well as external information on European Patent Office and US Patent Office patent counts. We construct a new synthetic measure of competition and estimate the impact of patents on this measure at the industry level. Then, the effect of industry-wide competition and patenting on firms’ innovation is estimated at the firm level. Our results suggest that patents reduce the level of competition in the industry, whereas the effect of competition on innovation varies with the type of innovation indicator. Thus, by lowering competition, patents in an industry exert an indirect effect on innovation besides their direct effect. In addition, interaction effects between patents and competition indicate that patents soften the impact of competition changes on firms’ innovation.     

Patent analysis of genetic engineering research in Japan,Korea and Taiwan

The aim of this study is to reveal the research growth, the distribution of research productivity and impact of genetic engineering research in Japan, Korea and Taiwan by taking patent bibliometrics approach. This study uses quantitative methods adopt from bibliometrics to analyze the patents granted to Japan, Korea and Taiwan by United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) from 1991 to 2002. In addition to patent and citation count, Bradford’s Law is applied to identify core assignees in genetic engineering. Patent coupling approach is taken to further analyze the patents granted to the core assignees to enclose the correlations among the core assignees. 13,055 genetic engineering patents were granted during the period of 1991 to 2002. Japan, Korea and Taiwan own 841 patents and Japan owns most of them. 270 assignees shared 841 patents and 16 core assignees are identified by the Bradford’s Law. 18,490 patents were cited by the 13,055 patents and 1,146 out of the 18,490 cited patents were granted to Japan, Korea and Taiwan. The results show Japan performs best in productivity and research impact among three countries. The core assignees are also Japan based institutions and four technical clusters are identified by patent coupling.     

Percentage Patent Representation (PPR) Bilateral Patent Balance (BPB) and Patent Dominancy (PD) indicators characterizing international patenting relations

In order to characterize the integration of countries into the world intellectual property network some indicators are offered. Percentage Patent Representation (PPR) gives the percentage share of patents granted to the inventors of a given country in the total number of patents granted to all foreign patentees. The ratio of PPR indices for two countries yields the Bilateral Patent Balance (BPB) indicator, which is characteristic of a mutual patent representation. Patent Dominancy (PD) index is the number of BPB indices higher than unity for a set of countries. PD indices can be related to GDP and growth of export values.     

Prolific inventors—A bibliometric analysis

Patent information on 7392 inventors who received 9 or more U.S. Patents during 1975–84 was obtained. Analysis of the frequency distribution of patents per inventor reveals an approximately logarithmic decline from 9 to approximately 45 patents per inventor. The rate of decline decreases significantly for patent output above 45 patents per inventor. Patent citation analysis on 45 randomly selected inventors was performed. This sample included inventors who received from 9 to over 100 patents. The group received 1.79 citations per patent, 56.8% of the patents received at least 1 citation, and 2.7% of the patents received 10 or more citations. No statistically significant differences for these averages was found across the range of inventor patent output. No significant decline of patent quality with increased yearly patent output was observed.     

Corporate management of patents: Role of the industrial librarian

This paper is directed for the most part to the Corporate Management of Patents, from a technical information viewpoint. The librarian, who is seldom the direct user of patents, should become knowledgeable in the rich resources of patent data. Technology transfer can be accomplished by the engineer and scientist having the complete picture, which the librarian offers in response to a search request. The General Electric Company is used as an example of corporate patent management. The author prepared two surveys. Major library schools were questioned on whether courses in Patent Information are part of the curriculum requirements of a special librarian. The other survey directed itself to several dozen major industrial libraries in the United States on patent handling and management. The results of these surveys are given. Although there are over 30 patent depositories in the United States (see Appendix I), the ‘average’ research librarian does not make complete use of these depositories. In some cases, the survey indicated they were unaware of these data sources.The paper describes several key patents within the General Electric Company supported by library research, and specifically, man-made diamonds. On-line retrieval systems, where patent license data is offered by NASA and DTIC, are an example of sources available to the aerospace librarian, and the paper concludes with a forecast of how libraries and special libraries will retrieve patents and patent applications before the next century commences.     

Indirect patent citations

Patent citations are extensively used as a measure of patent quality. However, counting citations does not account for the fact that citations come from patents of different qualities, and that citations are of variable qualities. We develop a citation index which takes into account the cumulative quality of the citing patents. We apply this index to the 2,139,314 utility patents granted in the U.S. between 1975 and 1999. We study the properties of this index by year and by technological category, and analyse the links between patents.     

The use of patent information for the identification of development trends

The publications on a specific technical field issued by the patent officers within a certain period of time do not only reflect the inventive activities and the “production” of new technical knowledge in a country, but also signalize forthcoming industrial activities and therefore indicate new technological trends. The focal points of these inventive activities may e.g. be ascertained from the bibliographical data on published patent applications compiled according to the International Patent Classification. These data also provide information on the granting of existing and imminent patents in the different industrial countries.     

Patent portfolios of European wind industry: New insights using citation categories

This study explores the use of citation categories assigned by patent examiners to study overlap of patent portfolios among top wind power firms. Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC) is used to obtain a sample of wind industry patents. CPC is shown to be better than the International Patent Classification for identifying patents relevant to the wind power industry. Results show high inter-firm citation among the top wind industry players that can suggest concentration of innovation. The results can be useful for patent analysts, technology managers and policy makers.     

The choice of examiner patent citations for refusals: evidence from the trilateral offices

Utilizing a novel methodology based on international family-to-family patent citation data, this paper directly compares X/Y patent citations (i.e., those cited as grounds for rejections, equivalent to “blocking patents” in the US) between major patent offices. Remarkable discrepancies between the offices were revealed, despite the common patentability criteria of novelty and inventive step to generate citations. This paper then introduces a simple cosine similarity measurement between a family of X/Y patent citations and all citations added globally to the same original application. How the discrepancies of X/Y patent citations at the European Patent Office (EPO) and the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) relate to the characteristics of applications and longitudinal aspects of office actions were also examined. X/Y patent citations from both the EPO and USPTO commonly show that the range of patent application classes is positively correlated with divergent reasons for refusal, suggesting that costly examinations lead to diversified X/Y patent citations. One novel methodological feature of this paper is that examiner citations across jurisdictions are comparable if we employ family-to-family citations and common criteria for the X/Y citation category. Furthermore, unlike the normal citation-generating process where a citing document adds citations to prior art only once, this paper represents the first attempt to analyze a citation network with multiple citing opportunities from separate parties. We find that the variance of citation linkages has a negative relationship with the ease in which different citers evaluate prior art in the same way, thereby providing a new perspective on the notion of breadth in citation impact.     

Chinese patent applications reach six figures in 1996

Since the Chinese Patent Office started accepting patent applications on 1 April 1985, the yearly patent application number has increased steadily, although a sluggish period appeared later. The Office expected to reach the 100,000 year mark in the last year of the century, that also will be the end of the national “Ninth Five-year Plan” period. However, the promotion of science and technology and the sustained and rapid economic growth in the country have shown China to be a huge potential market, and this has contributed to a recent sharp increase in patent applications both from home and abroad. The number of applications filed in 1996 reached 102,735, 23.7% higher than the total number of 83,044 made in 1995. Of the 1996 applications, 80% came from domestic applicants and 20% were of foreign origin. The Chinese Patent Office granted 43,780 patents in the same year. A faster examination process of better quality and a more efficient overall administration procedure were scheduled at the Patent Office in order to cope with the new challenge.