Academic IP News

The New York Times reported on April 10 on a new study that found that university scientists who received grants from the National Cancer Institute received a large number of patents and started companies in "surprisingly high numbers."

The study was conducted by economists at Indiana University and the Max Planck Institute of Economics in Germany with the support of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. The report is available at www.kauffman.org.

In related news, Research Money magazine reported that revenue from intellectual property created by Canadian universities and hospitals had declined 7.7 percent in 2004. However, the number of invention disclosures increased 19 percent to 1,353, while patented inventions increased 23 percent to 647. These are preliminary statistics compiled by StatsCan from a survey that went to 88 universities and 47 hospitals. The final tally will be published in a working paper later this year.

Univ. of California Receives Most Patents in 2005

Researchers at the University of California received 390 patents in 2005, according to the annual list published Thursday by the USPTO. This is the 12th consecutive year that UC has ranked number 1 among U.S. universities receiving patents. UC has received more than 5,500 U.S. patents since Jan. 1, 1976 and is the designated assignee on more than 1,400 pending applications published since March 2001.

For more information about university patenting and technology transfer, see the Association of Univeristy Technology Managers (AUTM) web site. AUTM regularly publishes reports and surveys on academic patenting and licensing.

Satisfaction with Govt Web Sites Dips

According to the latest report of the American Customer Satisfaction Index e-gov survey, "Customer satisfaction with federal Web sites dipped slightly last quarter for the first time in a year, although users are generally more satisfied with the information the government has online." (Reported in Government Computer News, March 21, 2006.)

Apparently, the USPTO is no longer participating in the ACSI e-gov survey, as it doesn't appear among the Q1 scores. It was first included two years ago in the March 2004 ACSI report. ACSI scores are archived at http://www.theacsi.org/government.htm.

Academic Innovation Success Stories

Last year the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM) launched the Better World Project to promote public understanding of how academic research and technology transfer benefits society and improves our way of life. AUTM has now released two publications highlighting academic innovations and a database of more than 100 products.

The Better World Report
Case studies on 25 innovations from academic research and technology transfer.

Reports from the Field
Profiles of 100 technology transfer success stories from Canada and the U.S. Innovations are grouped into 19 categories including biotechnology, environment, medical and nanotechnolgy. Also includes indexes by geographic location and institution. Unfortunately, Although many of the innovations are patented, no patent numbers are given. In most cases, however, it is easy to retrieve related patents from online databases using the information provided in a profile. (A good source of teaching examples?)

BWP DatabaseInnovations are searchable by field of application, institution, location or keyword. Again, no patent numbers are not included. (Perhaps a future improvement?)

Both reports are available for purchase or may be downloaded for free. The database is also provided free of charge. Lastly, a supplemental report on academic innovations from UK institutions is available.

Patent Information News 1/2006

The latest issue of the EPO's Patent Information News (formerly EPIDOS News) is now available.

Articles include:

- Determining the value of a European patent
- IPC8 data in the EPO's databases
- IPC reform and XML
- IPC reform - the user's view
- OPS document delivery
- esp@cenet update

Searching Chinese and Japanese Designs

The European Patent Office has published two new guides on how to search Chinese and Japanese designs using Locarno classifications. Look for them under "Tips and Tricks for Searching Databases" in the EPO Far East FAQ - Japan and FAQ - China.

British Library Launches New "Business and IP Centre"

The British Library has launched a new service for innovators, entrepreneurs and business owners called the "Business and IP Centre" or BIPC. BIPC is built around the impressive patent and market research collections of the BL and offers free workshops, seminars, speakers, case studies and an e-newsletter.

New Archive Search Tool May Reveal Lost U.S. Patents

Librarians and historians know that researching early U.S. patents is often a frustrating exercise that ends in disappointment. Although the U.S. government registered approximately 10,000 patents from 1790 through 1836, almost all original U.S. patent documents and files from this period were lost in a devastating fire that swept through the Patent Office in the early morning hours of December 15, 1836. The Patent Office, using funds provided by Congress, attempted to rebuild its files by obtaining copies of patents from inventors. About 2,500 patents, the majority from the 1820s and 1830s, were recovered in this way. For the remainder, all that is known is the title, inventor name, and date. These patents are called "X" patents because of the unique serial number assigned to them many years later. Patent No. X1, the first U.S. patent, was granted to Samuel Hopkins on July 31, 1790. Copies of recovered X patents, many in handwritten script, are available in the USPTO web-based patent database.

Some experts believe that there are many more early U.S. patents waiting to be discovered in court archives, libraries, archives and attics. Indeed, over the years researchers and patent buffs have stumbled across several missing patents in archives and libraries. One of the largest caches was discovered in August 2004 when two New Hampshire patent attorneys located 14 lost patents in Dartmouth Library. A systematic search of courthouse archives and libraries would undoutably turn up more, but none has ever been undertaken (to my knowledge), probably because the cost would be prohibitive.

Fortunately, patent researchers now have access (until May 31) to a powerful new tool that may help them identify copies of lost pre-1836 U.S. patents located in archives, museums and libraries around the world. ArchiveGrid, an initiative of RLG, contains collection descriptions of nearly a million historical documents, personal papers and family histories from thousands of institutions. In effect, ArchiveGrid is a union catalogue of archival collections. RLG is seeking additional grants and sponsorships to keep the system free of charge.

A simple keyword search in ArchiveGrid discovered the following tantalizing patent documents, none of which appear in the USPTO database. (X patent number obtained from list of name and date patents, July 31, 1790 to July 2, 1836.)

Patent number: X3502
Merrow, Joseph M., 1848-1947.
Patent, gunpowder, 1822 April 19.
1 sheet ; 25 cm.
Notes and Summaries: Old Sturbridge VillageMStuO
Shelving control number: 1993.63 pc
Photocopy of "Letters patent" in making gunpowder, in names of Joseph M. Merrow and Robert McKee, Jr.See also Visual Resource Library for photo of Merrow Mill, and Manuscript Information File.McKee, Robert, Jr.RLG Union Catalog Record ID: MAOV93-A103

Patent Number: X5325
Mosher, Reuben.
Patent, 1829.
l item.
New York State Library
Manuscripts and Special Collections
New York State Library
Shelving location: Empire State Plaza, Albany, NY 12230.N
Shelving control number: 21208

Patent Number: X8725
Martin Rich patent, 1835. 1 item.
Patent issued to Martin Rich for an improvement in Iron Dogs for a Saw Mill called the Gauge Saw Mill Dog. Signed by Andrew Jackson, President of the United States, and dated March 27, 1835.Preferred Citation: Martin Rich Patent, #272m. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.Cornell University LibraryNICShelving control number: 272m.

U.S. Patent Counts, Jan. 1-Mar. 9, 2006

U.S. patent issues remained strong but stable in the second half of February and into the first week in March, perhaps signaling an end to four months of lower than anticipated patent grants.

The number of published applications jumped to more than 6,200 on March 2. The combined total of issued patents and published applications for the week of February 26 was more than 10,000.

2006 Patent Focus Report - Thomson KnowledgeLink

A little late but the Jan/Feb issue of Thomson's KnowledgeLink newsletter has an interesting article highlighting the most important patent developments in China, Europe, India, Japan and the US.

A PROLIFIC YEAR IN PATENTING - 2006 PATENT FOCUS REPORT

DOE Launches Megasearch Initiative

According to a report in Federal Computer Week, the Energy Department's Office of Science and Technology Information is launching a new "megaportal" initiative called Global Discovery that will allow users to retrieve scientific and technical information from four existing portals, "Science.gov, a portal with millions of pages of pre-publication research findings, a search engine for science conference proceedings and a database of international research on energy – by entering one query on one Web site."

The USPTO patent database is one of many government sci-tech resources that can be searched via the Science.gov portal. Users may search it in tandem with other Science.gov resources or select just the USPTO database. However, the search engine is crude at best. While Science.gov retrieves keywords in patent titles with the same accuracy as the USPTO search engine--the title search "(pill or capsule) and (coating or film)" retrieves 10 patents. An identical search in the USPTO database retrieves the same 10 patents--it doesn't find data in some fields, such as current classification, and has difficulty with inventor and assignee names. Search results are limited to 50 hits.

Science.gov searches only the USPTO patent database and not the published applications database, which contains ~1.2 million documents or roughly 15 percent of all US patent documents.

19th c. Patent Digests in Google Book Search

In December 2004, Google announced a partnership with four university libraries and the New York Public Library to scan and digitize millions of the books in their collections, many of them copyrighted. The goal of Google Book Search, as the project is called, is to make the full text of books owned by the world's leading libraries and publishing houses available on-line within a decade.

While publishers and copyright owners have been successful in curbing Google's efforts to scan works still protected by copyright, GBS is scanning older publications and materials not covered under copyright. This is a boon to researchers who want access to 19th and 20th century U.S. government documents, which are not copyrighted. For example, inventors, genealogists and historians can now access a few indexes and digest of patents published by the U.S. Patent Office in the mid-19th century. One example (bearing a Harvard Library bookplate) is:

A digest of patents issued by the United States including the years 1839, 1840, and 1841
to which is added the present laws relating to patents
Henry L. Ellsworth, Commissioner of Patents
Washington: William Greer, 1842

The digest list patents under the twelve classes of the U.S. patent classification system in alphabetical order by title. A separate section includes the text of patent laws up to August 1842.

As Google Book Search grows, more patent indexes and digests are sure to appear. In a short time it may be possible for anyone to browse by inventor name or subject the 19th century U.S. patent record. Of course, the USPTO web site already has a database of scanned images of U.S. patents back to 1790. However, patents prior to January 1976 can only be retrieved by patent number or current classification. Inventor name and title are not searchable. The presence of 19th century patent indexes in Google Book Search will make it easier for researchers to locate patents by inventor name, date and subject.

U.S. Patent Counts, Feb. 5-29

The number of issued patents continued to rise through the first three weeks in February, reaching a six-month high of 4,064 on February 21. A patent milestone was reached on February 14: the USPTO issued patent no. 7,000,000. The total number of patents issued in 2006 now stands at 25,032.

Published applications declined from 5,624 on February 2 to 4,862 on February 23. The total number of published applications in 2006 is 41,976, almost twice the number of patents.

New USPTO Class Order: Classes 2, 57, 428

The USPTO has published Classification Order 1,854, dated February 7, 2006. The order affects subclasses in Class 2 - Apparel; Class 57 - Textiles: Spinning, Twisting, and Twining; and Class 428 - Stock Material or Misc. Articles.

U.S. Patent 7,000,000

Early this morning the USPTO issued utility patent no. 7,000,000. (A total of 3,920 other patents were also issued.)

The patent, which is assigned to DuPont, is for a new type of polysaccharide fiber and the process for making it. According to the abstract, the new fibers have "cotton-like properties" and are useful in textile applications. The inventor is John P. O'Brien, the recipient of several other patents for artificial fibers and methods of making them.

Of course, milestone patents are significant for more than just their numbers. With the recent furor over low-cost Chinese textile products flooding the U.S. after the expiration of the 30-year old international agreement on textiles in January 2005, this patent may be symbolic of the pressing need to invest in U.S. technological innovation and development. Despite textile industry and union appeals to "buy American", American consumers are unlikely to pay top dollar for American-made underwear and golf shirts when they can buy similar goods at much lower prices on the world market. The U.S. economy needs technological innovation more than ever in order to compete in the global economy.

Critics of globalization often complain about the "race to the bottom", i.e. that workers in industrialized countries will be forced to accept increasing pay cuts that make them more competitive with workers in developing countries like India and China. The answer to low-cost textile goods manfactured in China, India and other developing countries is not reducing the pay of American textile workers, it's investing in technological innovation that produces new materials, products and markets. The future of the U.S. textile industry is not cheaper golf shirts produced in more efficient mills by lower paid workers, it's technological innovation, research and development that leads to patentable inventions like Dupont's polysaccharide fibers.

U.S. Patent 7,000,000 on Feb. 14?

If the USPTO issues 3,155 or more utility patents next Tuesday, Feb. 14, it is likely that they will include patent number 7,000,000. The UPSTO issued 3,040 utility patents on Feb. 7. The highest numbered utility patent is currently 6,996,845. Given the timing, one has to wonder what the subject of the milestone patent will be...

Perhaps a new formulation for fat-free chocolate? A method of identifying potential mates on-line? A recordable Valentine's Day card with a built-in video display and speakers?

Patent No. 6,000,000 was granted on December 7, 1999 to inventors Jeff Hawkins and Michael Albanese. Their invention was a system for synchronizing files on two computers, the core technology of the Palm Pilot PDA, the first commercially successful hand-held electronic organizer. Other million-milestone patents include:

5,000,000 (March 19, 1991)
Ethanol production by Escherichia coli strains co-expressing Zymomonas PDC and ADH genes

4,000,000 (Decembre 28, 1976)
Process for recycling asphalt-aggregate compositions

3,000,000 (September 12, 1961)
Automatic reading system (barcodes)

2,000,000 (April 30, 1935)
Vehicle wheel construction

1,000,000 (August 8, 1911)
Vehicle tire

Chinese Universities Increase Patent Filings

There have been many articles and opinion pieces in American business and engineering magazines in recent months warning of the threat of China overtaking the U.S. in technical education and innovation. A recent issue of ASEE Prism, the magazine of the American Society for Engineering Education, concludes that China is in the process of creating world-class engineering universities. One of the keynote speakers at ASEE's 2005 annual conference, Dwight Streit, VP of Foundation Technologies for Northrup-Grumman, warned that China is graduating some 325,000 new engineers per year compared to 70,000 in the U.S. A recent BusinessWeek article noted that Indian engineering firms are poised to capture more U.S. engineering and design work. It concludes that U.S. engineers need to be redeployed to higher-valued jobs.

Chinese universities are also making impressive progress in the realm of intellectual property. According to an article in the June issue of KnowledgeLink (Thomson Scientific), Chinese university patent activity is increasing at a faster rate than scholarly publications, a frequently cited measure of academic research output, because of intellectual property law reform and government policies encouraging domestic research and commercialziation. According to the 2004 annual report of China's State Intellectual Property Office, Chinese universities and research institutes accounted for 17 percent of the approximately 111,000 new patent applications filed in 2004. Tsinghua University accounted for 875 new patent applications alone, followed by Shanghai Jiaotong University with 829 and Zhejiang University with 762. In comparison, the University of California (all campuses) filed 424 new patent applications with the USPTO in 2004, followed by Cal Tech with 135, and MIT with 132, in 2004. The World Intellectual Property Organization reported recently that Chinese PCT filings increased by 43.7 percent in 2005.

USPTO Keeps Fees in President's 2007 Budget

President Bush's budget proposal for fiscal year 2007 recommends that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office keep all of the roughly $1.8 billion it collects in patent and trademark fees and supports additional increases for reducing application processing times and improving quality.

Inventors and intellectual property owners have long complained of Congress's habit of diverting USPTO fees to fund other federal programs. Funding for the USPTO, an agency of the Department of Commerce, is covered in the bill authorizing the budgets of the Departments of Commerce, State and Justice. President Bush has supported ending the practice of diversion in recent budget proposals.

The USTO will need access to all its funds in order to decrease its increasing backlog of patent applications and support e-government initiatives. Last year the USPTO hired some 970 patent examiners and received more than 400,000 new patent applications. The USPTO expects to hire approximately 1,000 more examiners per year throught fiscal year 2011, according to testimony before Congress by Jon Dudas, Undersecretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the USPTO. The number of pending patent applications could increase from approximately 600,000 today to 1,000,000 by 2010, according to Dudas.

The USPTO has a mixed record on implementing technological solutions to its workload problem. The USPTO's award-winning Trademark Electronic Application System (TEAS), lauched in October, 1998 and its Trademark Electronic Search Search (TESS) have been very successful. More than 88 percent of new trademark applications are filed electronically, according to the USPTO's 2005 annual report. TESS includes all registered and pending trademark applications and expired trademarks since 1984. The USPTO's patent electronic filing system, EFS, despite significant investment, has not been successful. Less than 2 percent of new patent applications are filed electronically. Inventors and patent attorneys have complained of the system's difficult user interface, complexity and reliability. According to the annual report, a new, web-based version of EFS should be in full production mode by the end of 2006.

According to a report in Federal Computer Week, the USPTO plans to use much of the fiscal year budget authority to hire more patent and trademark examiners, and improve examiner traininng. The report also stated that the USPTO would budget $70.2 million to improve its patent automation system and an additional $18.2 million to enhance its trademark automation system. $10.1 million will be allocated for improvements to the USPTO's web-based information dissemination management system.

Japan, China, S. Korea Lead PCT Filings in 2005

The World Intellectual Property organization has reported a record 134,000 international patent application filings in 2005. China and the Republic of Korea were the countries with the largest increases in PCT filings, jumping to the 10th and 6th positions, respectively. Japan had the third largest growth in PCT filings. Together, the three Asian countries accounted for 24.1 precent of all international applications. In comparison, PCT filings from Canada numbered 2,315 and the United States 45,111.

U.S. Patent Counts, Jan. 22-Feb. 2

The number of patents granted by the USPTO increased in the final week of January, jumping from about 2,500 on January 24 to 3,500 on January 31. This is one of only a few weeks since September 2005 that the USPTO has granted more than 3,000 patents in one week. Prior to October 1, 2005 the USPTO regularly granted 3,000-3,500 patents per week. The number of published applications increased slightly to 5,500.