A continuing trend is for the top ten foreign countries receiving patents to make up 85% of the grantees. Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and China, four of the top five foreign recipients, account for 1,742 of the foreign grants. That's 57% of all of the foreign patents and 29.5% of all patents awarded this week.
Work has started on weekly analysis of co-inventorship. We have been looking at the level of global co-inventorship on new patents as well as how co-inventorship with dominant IP intense areas of the world reflects the informationization of R&D - the ability of researchers to collaborate across the globe. We are finding many cross-border teams linking Southern Hemisphere inventors to teams in Asia, Europe, and the US. By looking at where all of the inventors on patents are we get a much more refined look at who is inventing what and where. For example, when you count all the inventors to assign patents to a country, US and Asian inventors are even more dominant than when you are counting only first named inventors. We are also looking at homogenous inventorship where all of the inventors are from the same country vs. cross-border inventorship in an attempt to see where new pockets of expertise are emerging. We expect to have new statistics up in the coming weeks.
USPTO has granted 148,319 utility patents, 13,038 design patents, and 467 plant patents. While 410 design patents are granted each week, more a by product of the contract with USPTO's printing and digital production contract than a true indicator of inventive activity, it is interesting to watch the increasing correlation between the volume of information technology based inventions and the classification of the design patents being granted.
We are adding the Troll Roll. We are pragmatic about patent-asset backed business models and patent monetization and securitization. These business models are here to stay despite all the cage rattling in Washington and the Valley. So we have added a compendium of the latest patent monetization and patent assertion news around the web and beyond. While troll is still a pejorative for the architects and operators of these types of businesses, we couldn't find a snappier headline for the collection. When the President of the United States uses the term we guess it's gone mainstream. No offense Mr. Spangenberg, Mr. Ryan, and Mr. Myhrvold.
Here is the Link-O-Matic to our recent articles:
Hate the Game Not the Player - Our take on the NY Times article about Erich Spangenberg, the king of patent trolling and our take on his business model.
Failing the Straight Face Test - Boston University Law's IP professor spread the word about the evils of patent trolls with their ubiquitous study that proclaims $23B in lost innovation due to patent trolls while the Trustees file patent infringement lawsuit against Apple asserting an 18 year old patent based on prior art dating back 22 years.
Who's Calling? - There are lots of reasons why patent assertion entities and their partners, investors, and other cohorts don't want the Real Party In Interest disclosed in the normal course of their patent monetization business activities. We provide some of the top reasons.
We are also getting ready to publish our weekly invention reports. We pick an invention from the top classes of patents awarded each week to have a quick look at what people are inventing. We start with business methods and other information age inventions.
Be sure to check out the Link-O-Matics that come with each article. We provide the links to the policy, business, and academic work that surrounds the topics discussed in our articles. We hope this keeps the articles in context and give our readers real world context on the background of the issues.
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