Posts Tagged: "statistics"

There is no way to know for sure whether the applicant could have achieved an allowance had they hung in, but it would have been helpful to know that the examiner was very experienced and likely had decision making authority. Such an observation would have given great insight into the fact that the examiner in question here has an overall allowance rate of nearly 70%. It no doubt would have also been helpful to know that after an interview in over 50% of cases, the next significant event following the interview was an allowance. In short, the statistical data shows that this was an experienced patent examiner who is interested in working with applicants and their representatives to identify allowable subject matter and issue patents where appropriate.

I wrote something incorrect about SPE Len Tran and for that I apologize to him and to the USPTO and to readers who were lead astray. The fact is that if you do a simple Google patent search you will see that since the time he became a SPE in 2008 he has signed many hundreds of patents. SPE Len Tran is not an examiner or SPE that refuses to issue patents. To the contrary, he has issued many patents for a variety of different technologies and seems to be an example of a good supervisor.

As far as I am concerned the problem is not generically with patent assertion entities, or even the likes of entities like Acacia Research, or with patent litigators such as Ray Niro. Both engage in comprehensive due diligence before getting involved with a patent owner, turning away more than 99% of what is presented to them for evaluation. Actors like Acacia and Niro seek to enforce good patents that are widely being infringed. Somewhere along the way society has chosen to vilify them and the patent owners they represent as if striving to achieve a patent on an innovation of fundamental importance is evil incarnate. What a sad commentary on the cluelessness of the masses.

Any discussion of flaws in the United States patent system inevitably turns to the system’s modern villain: non-practicing entities. They are known more colorfully as patent trolls, although the business model of non-practicing entities has appeared in copyright markets as well as well as in patent markets. In the America Invents Act, Congress directed the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) to conduct a study “on the consequences of patent infringement lawsuits brought by non-practicing entities.” At the GAO’s request, we provided data on non-practicing entities for five years (2007-2011).

As you click through to each of the blogs, you will notice the content on each of the blogs is different. Patentlyo.com appears to be statistically driven. Mr. Crouch produces many different patent stats. We appreciate him for that. Gene’s IPWatchDog.com blog is filled with opinion of legal patent developments. Againstmonopoly.com highlights how patents and other IP protection hurt society. The list goes on and on. Instead of visiting only the top blogs, I recommend that you spend some time reviewing each of the blogs because each blog infuses a bit of their own perspective and personality into the online conversations currently occurring in the blogosphere.

In trying to determine whether patent litigation is out of control it is worth looking at the numbers of patent cases terminated and how they are terminated. What becomes clear is that there is no statistically relevant increase in the number of trails over the last 30 years even with a significant increase in the number of cases commenced. The following charts show that while actual trials remains largely constant over the last 30 years there has been growth in the number of patent litigations terminated without any court action, as well as increase in cases terminated with court action and before pre-trial and the number of cases terminated between pre-trial and trial.

The Visualization Center shows graphics that look much like a speedometer, which is where the Patents Dashboard moniker comes from, but the data is also available for those who want to see the numbers and figures used to create the easy to understand graphics. It is not pretty to see that the average pendency to a case where a Board decision is necessary is 76.1 months, and the average pendency of a case where one or more RCEs are filed is 60.7 months. This is unacceptable and hopefully leaders in Congress are paying attention! They have been mislead for many years. So the numbers are in some cases going to be terrifying, but ignoring the truth simply will not lead to the change and efficiencies needed.

Patent applications as a whole over the past 10 years have had an average allowance to rejection ratio of about 0.3. We arrived at this ratio by generating a list of 300 randomly selected application serial numbers in the 10/, 11/, and 12/ series, and individually reviewing the transaction histories for each serial number. An allowance to rejection ratio of 0.3 corresponds to about one allowance for every three rejections. First office actions have a somewhat lower allowance ratio than the average. This is consistent with the common knowledge that applicants will take a more aggressive position with the claims that they file relative to the amended claims they present after a rejection. The allowance to rejection ratio for second and higher rejections remains relatively constant. This has the somewhat disturbing implication that practitioners and examiners are not getting any better at understanding each other as prosecution progresses. If practitioners and examiners were learning from each rejection – response interchange, then the allowance ratio would increase for each succeeding office action.

I am pleased to announce the top 50 patent blogs. This is non-scientific, but efforts have been made make the list as meaningful as possible.  Phase 1, which counted for 50% of the score, was an objective phase that was based on links and traffic, as determined by my research using Technorati and Alexa.  Phase 2, which likewise counted for…

It was not very easy this month to come up with good statistics relating to traffic to IPWatchdog.com.  In an effort to focus on business, I decided to try and move the site to a fully managed server.  The thought was if something went wrong it could be addressed immediately by those who do this sort of thing for a…

I am pleased to report our May 2009 statistics, which show that we had over 1,000,000 pages viewed during the month! Just last month I was excited that we were closing in on half a million page views a month, and in May we had a grand total of 1,190,168 page views, for our greatest total of pages viewed since…