US Patent Counts, Q3 2009

Posted on September 29, 2009 by mjwhitekingston

The USPTO issued 47,042 patents in Q3, a decline of 3.2 percent from the previous quarter and the lowest total this year. The number of published applications was also down slightly, dropping to 76,040 from 81,288 in Q2. Despite this slowdown the USPTO is still on track to exceed last year’s total of 312,854 published applications. More than 2.2 million applications have been published since 2001.

Table 1. Quarterly Patent and PGPub Counts*

2009 ….. Patents (B) …..PGPubs (A)….. Total (A + B)
Q1 ….. 49,227 ….. 83,855 ….. 133,112
Q2 ….. 48,596 ….. 81,288 ….. 129,884
Q3 ….. 47,042 ….. 76,040 ….. 123,082

*Based on preliminary weekly data from the USPTO website. Totals may change after the fact due to withdrawn patents and published applications.

Table 2. Weekly Averages and Medians (Q3)

Patents ….. 3,619 ….. 3,729
PGPubs ….. 5,697 ….. 5,768

Table 3. Number Ranges for 2009, Jan. 1 – Sept. 30

Utility patents ….. 7,472,428 – 7,596,812
Reissues ….. RE40,613 – RE40,925
PGPubs ….. 2009/0000001 – 2009/0241233
Designs ….. D584,026 – D601,325
Plants …… PP19,613 – PP20,374
SIRs ….. H2,228 – H2,232

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Patent Map from FreePatentsOnline

Posted on September 24, 2009 by mjwhitekingston

FreePatentsOnline has launched a new patent mapping service called Local Patents. The service combines inventor and assignee city data from 3 million US patents and published applications with a map of the US generated by Google Maps.

It’s very cool. You can drill down from the state level to city/town. The number of patent documents in a given geographic area is displayed in a circle ranging from purple (for high numbers) to green (for low numbers). Clicking on the city/town will list the titles of the documents granted to inventors/assignees in that location.

There a some glitches. A few patents do appear in Canadian cities, but not enough to account for all the US patents granted to Canadian residents. Some of these appear to be correct, but others are obviously wrong.

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Design Patent #600,000

Posted on September 16, 2009 by mjwhitekingston

Design patent no. 600,000 was issued this week to Goal Zero of Spanish Fork, Utah. The patent protects the design of a battery system.

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Robotic Fish Farms

Posted on August 21, 2009 by mjwhitekingston

Fish farming is under attack from environmentalists who claim that it pollutes bays and inlets and spreads infectious diseases like salmon anaemia. The main problem is that cages used in most fish farms are fixed in place, which concentrates fish waste and uneaten food on the sea floor. Clifford Goudey, a researcher at MIT, has invented a fish pen propelled by robotic engines, which will allow fish farmers to deploy their pens in a wider area and along natural fish migration routes. Goudey has patented a number of fishing-related inventions, including a mobile ring fish pen. (US5617813)

Patents related to floating fish farms are classified in ECLA A01K61/00F.

Posted in academic patents, fish farming, MIT | 2 Comments

Underwater Logging

Posted on August 21, 2009 by mjwhitekingston

A story in the Globe and Mail this week reported on a project to harvest dead trees, including valuable teak and mahogany, from a man-made lake in Ghana. The total value of the wood is estimated at up to $3 billion. This isn’t the first time that entrepreneurs have proposed recovering wood from the bottom of lakes and rivers. By some estimates, millions of logs were lost in North American rivers during log drives in the last century. Several small-scale recovery projects in BC and the State of Maine are underway. It made me wonder if anyone had patented technology for underwater logging.

Patents related to forestry are classified in ECLA classification A01G23. So a logical esp@cenet search strategy might be to combine A01G23 with the keywords “underwater” OR “submerg*”. This retrieves six documents, including three by inventor Cyril Burton of Castlegar, BC. Burton’s earliest patent was issued in 1973 for an “Underwater Saw for Stump and Tree Removal“; his most recent, a “Submersible Logging Device“, was issued in 1999. A Canadian application published in 2003 (CA2635367) describes a “method and apparatus for underwater tree cutting and retrieval” that involves a remote-controlled submarine and inflatable airbags.

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New Leadership at the USPTO

Posted on August 16, 2009 by mjwhitekingston

The USPTO has a new leader. On Thursday, August 13, David Kappos was sworn in as the Undersecretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. He’s the 52nd person to hold that position since it was established in 1836.

The appointment and confirmation of Kappos was fairly speedy: only 6 months and 24 days after President Obama’s inauguration. President George W. Bush took almost eleven months to appoint James E. Rogan head of the USPTO in 2001. Bruce Lehman, President Clinton’s first Commissioner of Patents, was sworn in on Aug. 11, 1993.

How long will Kappos stay? The average term in recent years is between 2-4 years. Jon Dudas, Kappos’ immediate predecessor, served from Jan. 2004 to Nov. 2008 (including 5 months as acting director). James Rogan, President Bush’s first USPTO chief, served barely two years, from Dec. 2001 to Jan. 2004. Q. Todd Dickinson also served just 2 years, Jan. 1, 1999 to Jan. 20, 2001, including almost a year as acting director. Bruce Lehman served from 1993 through the end of 1998, almost 5.5 years.

Kappos faces a number of tough challenges including a huge backlog of pending applications, declining revenue due to lower filings and fewer paid maintenance fees, delayed patent reform legislation and disatisfaction among the USPTO’s 6,000 patent examiners.

The longest serving USPTO directors of the last hundred years were Thomas E. Robertson, who served during the Harding, Coolidge and Hoover administrations from 1921 through 1933, and Conway Coe, who served from 1933 through 1945. The director with the shortest tenure was Melvin Coulston, who served just one month, March 3 to April 5, 1921.

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"Investing in patents is no country for old men."

Posted on August 14, 2009 by mjwhitekingston

… That’s the message one pundit sees in this week’s patent infringement ruling against Microsoft. The article makes some interesting points about the cost of litigating a patent lawsuit and speculates on why Microsoft (or any high tech company) might chance a lawsuit rather than license a new and unproven technology.

i4i won a huge legal victory. But at what cost?
Fabrice Taylor
Globe and Mail, Aug. 14, 2009

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Les Paul, 1915-2009

Posted on August 13, 2009 by mjwhitekingston


World-renowned musician Les Paul, whose invention of the solid-body electric guitar transformed popular music in the 1950s and 60s, died on Aug. 12 at the age of 94. He was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2005.

Mr. Paul held at least two patents related to electric guitars. The first, which is mentioned in his NIHF bio, was issued in 1962. (US 3,018,680) The second, US 3,725,561, was issued ten years later in 1973. Both have been cited in numerous patents over the last forty years.

Many musicians have followed Les Paul’s example and patented inventions. Eddie Van Halen, co-founder of the 1980s mega-band Van Halen, has two patents (US 7,183,475 and US 4,656,917) and a design patent for a guitar peghead, US D388117. And in 1993, Michael Jackson patented (US 5,255,452) a special shoe that would allow a wearer to lean forward beyond his or her center of gravity, thus creating “an anti-gravity illusion”.

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Patent Ruling Against Microsoft

Posted on August 13, 2009 by mjwhitekingston


The big news today is the patent dispute between software leviathan Microsoft and i4i, a small (30 employees) Toronto-based software developer. Two years ago i4i sued Microsoft for using its patented technology in Microsoft Word. Yesterday, a judge in Texas overseeing the case ordered Microsoft to stop selling Word in sixty days.

The patent in question is US 5,787,449, a “method and system for manipulating the architecture and the content of a document separately from each other.” Basically, i4i invented a way to turn the information in any word processing document into a searchable database by mapping the metacodes, such as XML, in the document.

Although relatively few patents are cited in later patents, i4i’s patent, which was issued in 1998, has been cited by a dozen patents assigned to IBM, Microsoft, Sun, Hitachi, Xerox and Netscape. This is a strong indication that i4i’s technology is important.

It’s interesting to note that computer-controlled text processing technology goes back more than 50 years. i4i’s patent is classified in USPC Class 715, which covers data processing related to documents, interfaces and screen savers. About 20,000 patents and 20,000 published applications are classified in 715. The earliest patent classified in 715 is US 2,762,485, issued on Sept. 11, 1956, for an “automatic composing machine.” The patent describes a system for printing text using a computer-controlled type-setting machine.

Posted in i4i, Microsoft, software | 2 Comments

US Assignment Data in espacenet

Posted on August 12, 2009 by mjwhitekingston

The June issue of Patent Information News states that the EPO is in the process of reloading US assignment records into its legal status database. When the project is finished US patents in esp@cenet will be linked to more than six million assignments dating back to 1981. Assignment data has been available for some US docs in esp@cenet, but much of the data was corrupted by technical problems. I assume that this includes all the data available on the USPTO’s web assignment database and Cassis ASSIGN, although both give a slightly earlier start date of August 1980.

Posted in Assignments, USPTO | 2 Comments