Posts Tagged: "trends"

Q4 2017 saw a total of 981 patent infringement cases filed in district courts, the second-lowest total for any quarter in 2017 and the third-lowest total for any quarter dating to the third quarter of 2011. The 4,057 patent suits filed in district court through 2017 was the lowest total for an entire year since 2011… A week-by-week graph of patent filings shows that, while Eastern Texas saw a much greater share of patent filings than Delaware in the months leading up to the TC Heartland decision, Delaware filings have topped Eastern Texas filings in almost every week since the SCOTUS decision.

Among the key findings of the report include the more than 73 percent of respondents filed patents in four or more countries during last year. That was up from the 62 percent filing in four or more countries in 2015 from the last RWS inovia global trend indicator. Overall patent filing is becoming more international by nature as more than 41 percent of respondents filed more than half of their patent applications during 2016 in foreign jurisdictions, up from 34 percent filing in 2015. The report also found that 2016 saw patent owners file patent applications for the first time in a number of jurisdictions like Mexico, South Africa, Australia, Turkey, Brazil and India; 96 percent of these patent applications were filed under the terms of the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT).

Given the broad range of countries deploying UAVs and the large number of applications for UAVs, we took a look at patent data from the last 20 years (1997 to 2016) to determine whether any trends in UAV development could be identified. Our findings show some surprising results with regard to development and patenting of drone technology. In this analysis we focuses on the top-5 patent offices for obtaining UAV related patents, the State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO) in China, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), the European Patent Office (EPO), the Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO) in South Korea, and the Japan Patent Office (JPO).

To uncover and visualize underlying trends in the subject matter of patents, we analyzed four decades of data from the USPTO PAIR database, from 1977 through 2016, inclusive. Extracting the title of each granted patent or application and the date it was filed yields 493 megabytes of data, comprising 7.7 million records and 59.8 million words… The pronounced shift from blue words to orange words in the animated visualization suggests a major trend in the last 40 years away from patents related to materials and machines (as signified by words such as “compounds,” “machine,” and “valve”) and toward patents related to information (as signified by words such as “display,” “image,” and “processing”).

Recently, we took a closer look at four of the largest trending stories playing out in the world of intellectual property and patents during 2016. Today we turn to the world of technology to see what trends have been developing in the technology sector over the past year. From an ever-widening scope of business activities being pursued by Silicon Valley’s largest firms to growing government authority over one sector of Internet services, there have been plenty of interesting stories playing out on the stage of America’s tech sector.

Suffice it to say that 2016 has been an interesting year. The political climate is much different than one year ago amidst a growing tide of nationalism abroad and populism here in the United States. Throw in a massive migration crisis stemming from the Middle East, a slew of unexpected celebrity passings and the fact that the Chicago Cubs are lovable losers no more, and we’re about to wind down a year which seems nearly mythological in stature… As we turn the page onward to 2017, it’s a good time to take another look at some of the major trends shaping the IP and technology landscape in the United States and abroad. From increasing competition with an Asian powerhouse to the continuation of a misleading narrative about patent system abuses, the past year leaves us with many important narratives to consider for the year ahead.