Patent activity continued to plummet by Fairfield County inventors in 2010, a year in which the U.S. Supreme Court allowed a key type of patent protection to stand as Congress again weighs patent reform.
In 2010, Fairfield County inventors filed about 1,400 patent applications, off 13 percent from a year ago for a second straight year of double-digit decline. Not since 2002 have local inventors filed fewer than 1,400 patent applications in a calendar year; the high point of the past decade was 2006, when about 1,950 patent applications were submitted from Fairfield County.
Patent application figures can fluctuate at the local level depending on how long it takes the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to publish them online.
In 2010, IBM Corp. became the first company to exceed 5,000 patents in a single year, according to data compiled by IFI Claims Patent Services, a Wilmington, Del.-based unit of Fairview Research. Big Blue recorded nearly 5,900 patents in all ”“ some of them the work of Fairfield County residents ”“ marking the 18th straight year the Armonk, N.Y.-based company has led the nation.
Fairfield-based General Electric Co. led all Connecticut-based companies with 1,225 patents awarded last year, while Norwalk-based Xerox Corp. ranked 25th overall with just under 860 patents. Both GE and Xerox have their technology centers in upstate New York.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office awarded more patents last year than in any previous, IFI Claims stated, and the 31 percent jump from 2009 was also the largest on record.
“The tremendous increase in patent issues in 2010 suggests that so far the economy doesn”™t appear to have slowed patent flow significantly in the U.S.,” said Darlene Slaughter, general manager of IFI Claims Patent Services, in a prepared statement. “Another important factor is the stepped up effort of the USPTO to improve turnaround times and its five-year strategic plan to increase efficiencies ”¦ There is still a backlog of patents pending, but the number of grants continues to grow even after a period of economic downturn.”
The very legality of a broad swath of patents was in question during the past year, after the Supreme Court deliberated on whether “business process” patents ”“ a class that could include some types of software ”“ were enforceable. In Bilski v. Kappos, the Supreme Court dismissed the assertion that a patent must pass a “machine transformation” test to be valid, in essence allowing business patents to proceed.
Speaking at Columbia University in New York City in mid-December, USPTO Under Secretary David Kappos outlined steps his agency is taking in the time to process a patent. Those measures include a “three-track” program that allows applicants for multiple patents to designate the ones they want expedited and a pilot program launched at the start of the year to speed the review time for “green” technologies.
“Currently, the average time between the approval of a green-technology petition and the first action on an application accepted into the program is just 49 days,” Kappos said. “In several cases, patent applications in the green-technology program have been issued within a year of the filing date.”
Kappos was scheduled to speak Jan. 19 after press deadline to members of the Connecticut Intellectual Property Law Association in New Haven on recent USPTO initiatives.
Even as he does so, national intellectual property law groups are lobbying the Obama administration to allow USPTO to retain all the fees it collects, arguing that it faced a $70 million shortfall in the 2010 fiscal year due to fees being repurposed for other federal needs.
“The tremendous increase in patent issues in 2010 suggests that so far the economy doesn’t appear to have slowed patent flow significantly in the U.S.,â€
I disagree. Filings for small entities is down markedly as you pointed out. Patents for them are too hard to get, take too long, and are too hard to enforce. Large firms patent only for defensive use. If small firm filings tail off, large firm filings will too. Large firms flood the Office with aplns neither they or anyone else will ever use. Abandonment after a first office action is now becoming commonplace. Small entities who invent the lion’s share of breakthrough technologies will not fight the PTO to get patents. We will turn to trade secrets where possible, or otherwise take our discoveries with us to our grave.
Patents issuing now are based on applications filed 2-6 years ago. So if the numbers indicate anything, they indicate something that happened in the past.
Patent application filings are only known 18 months after filing and then only if the inventor(s) do(es) not request that the application not be published.