A Patent Primer

A patent is an official title of ownership of an invention, granted by the government, giving its owner the exclusive right to make, use, or sell that invention. Ownership of a patent can be transferred via reassignment from the original inventor to another individual or organization, after the original patent has been granted. Intellectual property (IP) refers to the ownership of valuable ideas and encompasses copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets and patents.

Patents and intellectual property represent an invaluable and untapped source of business intelligence and insight, particularly for companies in science and technology. Understanding who owns or is applying for patents can give you a serious competitive advantage in making strategic investment and business decisions, as this information demonstrates who is innovating and how research and development money is being spent.

Patents, patents, everywhere.

At last count, there were 7 million patents and 3 million unassigned patents in the U.S. alone. The rate at which patents are being granted is rising exponentially. Much of this massive amount of patent information is publicly available through the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). However, the government provides this data in an unorganized and largely unintelligible fashion.

Will the real patent owner please step forward?

One of the most daunting challenges in leveraging patent data is in searching for and identifying the true owners of particular patents. This challenge is compounded by several factors.

Subsidiaries: Many companies have subsidiaries — in some cases, over a thousand of them. Building a comprehensive patent portfolio for a given company requires identifying not only the patents that belong to a parent company, but those that belong to each of the company’s subsidiaries.
Solution: PatentVest conducts in-depth searches of companies and repeats this process for each one of their subsidiaries to establish true ownership.
   
Filing Names: Do you search for patents attributed to IBM, I.B.M., International Business Machines, or International Bus. Mach.? The answer is: all of them. Company names are often spelled differently or even misspelled in the process of filing patents and applications. This applies to their subsidiaries as well.
Solution: PatentVest meticulously searches all possible variations of a company’s name to ensure a complete and accurate picture of a company’s patent portfolio; this process is also repeated for all subsidiary companies.
   
Assignments: Companies often attach their names to patents after they have been granted. Few search tools reflect this transfer of ownership, and categorize patents under the ownership of the original inventor(s). What’s more, many patents are sold or reassigned years after they are granted, making it difficult if not impossible for most databases and search engines to provide accurate and current ownership information.
Solution: PatentVest reassigns all patents to their current, rightful owners — resulting in the only database that can present a truly accurate picture of a company’s IP portfolio.
   
Unassigned Applications: Many companies omit their names from application filings and instead file under the original inventor’s or some other name; this is often done for competitive reasons, but it can also be the result of a simple oversight. Other databases and search tools cannot identify which companies own these unassigned patents and applications prior to a formal reassignment.
Solution: PatentVest conducts exhaustive analyses of unassigned patents and re-assigns them to the companies that most likely own them. We categorize these as Implied Patent Applications. Our accuracy rate for Implied Patent Applications is 90%.

Understanding the Data

Until now, the wealth of patent data has been unavailable to the investment, financial and business communities. Existing search tools and engines used to navigate this data are typically built for the engineering and legal communities and are therefore difficult for the average investor to use and to understand. These software-only solutions also lack the dedicated labor resources needed to properly organize and format patent information into relevant, comprehensive, and usable formats. Companies therefore find themselves spending huge sums of money in patent due diligence and attorney fees. PatentVest simplifies this process, saving you time and money. 

PatentVest is much more than a software solution; our powerful proprietary database is reinforced with a dedicated data center manned by Patent Analysts. Our team conducts your due diligence by capturing and properly organizing patent data, then using this data to individually assemble usable, concise, and insightful reports, written in your language.