The US patent yeast batch continues to swell

Pity it makes lawsuits, not alcohol

Once again, for the 19th year in a row in fact, IBM is the king of new US patents awarded in a year and talk will now turn to the utility and futility of patents.

The annual rankings of patents awarded by the US Patent and Trademark Office used to come out of that government agency, but in 2007 it stopped because, as the public affairs officer told me at the time, people were too focused on patent counts and not on patent quality. Since then, IFI Claims Patent Services has diced and sliced the data in the USPTO databases and published the annual US patent count rankings, as a means of advertising for more complex patent services it offers for a fee.

By IFI's count, the USPTO office issued 224,505 utility patents in 2011, up by 2 per cent on 2010, which was a record-breaking year. Utility patents are machines or processes and can be electrical, mechanical, or physical in nature, while design patents cover the shape of and ornamentation on things.

Asian companies in particular have loaded on the paperwork for USPTO clerks, with 25 Japanese, South Korean, and Taiwanese companies ranking among the top 50 companies that were issued patents last year. Patent counts, like supercomputing petaflops, are political as much as they are technical and economic phenomena.

"This isn't to say that US companies have lost their verve for patent production, as their patent portfolios are also growing," explained Mike Baycroft, CEO at IFI, in a statement. It seems that Asian companies have apparently made it a higher priority."

Complicating the issue of sizing up the patent portfolios of the world is the fact that patents expire and companies both license and sell them - as well as get their hands on them through acquisitions. The IFI rankings don't take all of these factors into account, but just ranks companies by the number of utility patent grants they receive in the year from the USPTO. This is an oversimplification of the situation, and intentional to help drive business - just like any other subset of freebie data in the IT market.

IBM was granted 6,180 patents in 2011, and the company was crowing like a rooster that this was more than four times the patent grants attained by HP and six times more than what Oracle got. IBM said that more than 8,000 researchers contributed to these patents, with about a quarter of them coming from outside the US.

An IBM spokesperson contacted by El Reg said that if the company's Systems and Technology Group, which makes servers, storage, switches, chips, and systems software, were broken out as a separate entity, it would have over 2,800 patents by itself and would rank fourth on the IFI 2011 patent ranking.

Some of the IBM patents the company cited that were awarded in 2011 include #8,037,000 (Systems and methods for automated interpretation of analytic procedures), #8,005,773 (System and method for cortical simulation), and #8,019,992 (Method for granting user privileges in electronic commerce security domains). These all sound reasonably useful to the layman. But if you troll through the USPTO database, you can find things like # 8,095,941, which was actually issued yesterday by the USPTO, for a System for portion of a day out of office notification, which IBM applied for in September 2006.

Here's how the top 50 patent-getters did in 2011:

Rank	Company Name	Grants	Country
1	International Business Machines Corp	6180	United States
2	Samsung Electronics Co Ltd KR	4894	Korea
3	Canon K K JP	2821	Japan
4	Panasonic Corp JP	2559	Japan
5	Toshiba Corp JP	2483	Japan
6	Microsoft Corp	2311	United States
7	Sony Corp JP	2286	Japan
8	Seiko Epson Corp JP	1533	Japan
9	Hon Hai Precision Industry Co Ltd TW	1514	Taiwan
10	Hitachi Ltd JP	1465	Japan
11	General Electric Co	1448	United States
12	LG Electronics Inc KR	1411	Korea
13	Fujitsu Ltd JP	1391	Japan
14	Hewlett-Packard Development Co L P	1308	United States
15	Ricoh Co Ltd JP	1248	Japan
16	Intel Corp	1244	United States
17	Broadcom Corp	1164	United States
18	GM Global Technology Operations LLC	1095	United States
19	Renesas Electronics Corp JP	1005	Japan
20	Honda Motor Co Ltd JP	997	Japan
21	Toyota Jidosha K K JP	994	Japan
22	Cisco Technology Inc	980	United States
23	Fujifilm Corp JP	971	Japan
24	Micron Technology Inc	947	United States
25	Hynix Semiconductor Inc KR	935	Korea
26	Qualcomm Inc	923	United States
27	Brother Kogyo K K JP	888	Japan
28	Xerox Corp	880	United States
29	Sharp K K JP	872	Japan
30	Siemens AG DE	851	Germany
31	Silverbrook Research Pty Ltd AU	812	Australia
32	Texas Instruments Inc	794	United States
33	Honeywell International Inc	780	United States
34	Semiconductor Energy Laboratory Co	761	Japan
35	AT&T Intellectual Property I L P	721	United States
36	Koninklijke Philips Electronics N V NL	700	Netherlands
37	Boeing Co The	695	United States
38	Denso Corp JP	689	Japan
39	Apple Inc	676	United States
40	Research In Motion Ltd CA	663	Canada
41	LG Display Co Ltd KR	643	Korea
42	Bosch, Robert GmbH DE	622	Germany
43	NEC Corp JP	622	Japan
44	Infineon Technologies AG DE	617	Germany
45	Mitsubishi Denki K K JP	605	Japan
46	Fuji Xerox Co Ltd JP	587	Japan
47	Nokia AB Oy FI	585	Finland
48	ETRI	534	Korea
49	Telefonaktiebolaget L M Ericsson SE	529	Sweden
50	Du Pont de Nemours, E I & Co	523	United States

The number of utility patents issued in a given year is probably not as important as the size of the patent portfolio each company controls. El Reg contacted IFI to get patent counts for the top ten on the 2011 list, but we were told that such data would take days to compile and would nonetheless only be made available to paying customers.

An IBM spokesperson told us that Big Blue has over 34,000 active patents in its portfolio, which is perhaps a smaller number than you might be thinking IBM had. Now you understand why IBM keeps those patent applications rolling.

Sixteen of the vendors in the top 50 count from IFI, including Cisco Systems, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Microsoft, and Oracle, all had fewer patent grants in 2011 than they had in 2010. Apple is on the rise, breaking into the top 50 in 2010 at number 46 and hitting number 39 on the 2011 list.

Chip makers Renesas, Qualcomm, and Broadcom are also on the up, as are Research in Motion, LM Ericsson, Brother, Canon, and Toshiba. Car manufacturers got lots more patents too. In 2011, with Toyota, Ford, and GM lead the way in terms of patent growth, with Honda growing more modestly.

IFI said that the number of patent applications in flight at the USPTO is probably a better indicator of what a company is doing, research-wise, rather than last year's approved parent count. For example, in 2010, Samsung Electronics had 5,600 patent applications compared to fewer than 5,000 for IBM, and in 2011 the numbers were similar. If Samsung keeps this up, it may eventually eclipse the reigning patent champ. ®