Quotes of Christmas Round 2

"My view is that people are creative animals and will figure out cleaver ways to use tools that the inventor never imagined."

Steve Jobs as quoted in Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson.

Who knows what will come about when you give an innovative object to an innovative human.

Twelve Quotes of Christmas

I am a patent nerd. There. I've said it. It's out. I'm also an information nerd. Where is it? How do you find it? What does it mean? How do you make it useful? So this holiday season I bring you the twelve quotes of Christmas. For the next 12 days I bring you my favorite quotes about patents, information, and how the two converge. So here we go.

"If the inventory of ready-made words in our language determines which concepts you are able to understand, how would you ever learn anything new?"

By Guy Deutscher, Honorary Research Fellow, School of Languages, Linguistics, and Cultures at the University of Manchester.

See my earlier post on this one here.

Licensing Molecules

Molecule - a group of atoms bonded together, representing the smallest fundamental unit of a chemical compound that can take part in a chemical reaction.

Licensing - a permit from an authority to own or use something, do a particular thing, or carry on a trade.

Cognitive Dissonance - a discomfort caused by holding conflicting ideas simultaneously - like licensing molecules.

Abbott Labs Licenses Molecules From Reata.

This isn't a patentability debate it's just plain old cognitive dissonance on the headline.

(Reata Pharma has interesting patents with tons of non-patent prior art and lots of drawings of molecules. - It's probably easier to just license them than to try to read the patents.)

Looking for Assignees - Again

USPTO has issued a Request for Information on enhanced reporting of assignee information on patent and patent application ownership. The need for improved patent assignee data is compelling. If you are manufacturing a product and you figure out that you need a license to a piece of technology, a daunting task by itself, you should be able to at least find the real entity and the real people associated with the entity to see if you can get the license you need. At present, this is a challenge.

Take it from me, trolling the Secretary of State sites, Pacer, and countless other data sources to see who owns Obfuscation Patent Holdings, LLC of Nevada and its various subsidiaries, shell companies, and owners of record is a tiring pursuit. It's entertaining at times when you hit the jackpot and can figure out who owns the mysterious patent that keeps showing up in the cease and desist letters. Usually it's fruitless because hiding ownership of a patent is one of the easiest things you can do at USPTO. It's time for more transparency in patent assignee data and USPTO has provided an opportunity to provide your input on the subject.

Send in your comments, encourage full disclosure.

The patentability of medical tests that provide insight into how the human body reacts to disease and the drugs designed to treat them is a contentious issue. The test developers want patent protection on the inventions that they claim resulted in their specific discoveries. The medical and access to medicine constituencies believe that these tests are not patentable because they involve both abstract ideas and laws of nature.

Today's Wall Street Journal article provides an interesting overview of the issues, the players, and the upcoming Supreme Court cases.

Patent Pending Pipeline Prognostication

Here is a statistical mash up of the patent pending pipeline based on information from WIPO and USPTO.  Getting a comprehensive set of data for one complete year is hard to do since the publication dates on the different statistics varies from source to source, What one takes away from this pipeline prognostication is that there is a prodigious backlog of patent applications that is growing every year.  On a domestic and global basis the number of patents granted each year is less than half the number of new patent applications arriving each year.  The precarious position of patent offices world wide portends continued unrest in the patent sphere and the potential decline in protection of precious inventions.

Enough with the Ps.  Here's the statistics.

In 2010, the number of unprocessed patent applications world-wide stood at 5.17 million.

As of 2009, the number of patent applications filed globally was about 1.8 million a year. (The last year the global number of patent application is available.)

In 2008, the US share of that number was 482,871, about 27%.

In 2010 the number of US patent applications hit 520,277.

In 2009 the USPTO granted 191,927 patents.

By 2010 the US number of patents granted hit 244,341 - less than half of the volume of new applications coming in the door.

In 2008 the global number of grants was 777,556.

The average patent pendency - the period of time between the time a patent application is filed to the time a patent office makes a final decision - is around 32 months.  This number is lower than the US average which stands at about 34 months.

The number of patents in force in the US as of 2009 was 1,930,631.  The global number is a confusing hodge podge of counts by national patent office that doesn't lend itself to compiling one consolidated number.

The bottom line is protracted patent pendency persists.

A Magical Journey

Researchers at the Science Museum in London are embarking on a magical journey to try to build Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, the computational machine he invented in 1831.  The Analytical Engine is a mechanical device designed to handle mathematical computation.

According to today's New York Times Science Times the researchers are planning a 10 year, multi-million dollar (pounds really) adventure to take the blueprints of the various iterations of Mr. Babbage's invention and try to figure out how to actually build it.  The effort will include some crowd-sourced review of scanned copies of his drawings to seek suggestions from the public on the effort.

What is exciting about a project like this is the ability to see how the inventor's thinking about his invention evolved.  I have always been fascinated about the deep thinking of inventors and the convergence of how inventors invent and serendipitous discovery, serendipitous discovery being the ah ha moment or the discovery of something you didn't know you were looking for in the first place.  How did his ideas evolve, how did he change the way he described them - to himself.  How did Mr. Babbage translate his thinking onto paper?  Did his notes provide a road map to his discovery?  In today's digital age with a tendency to just keep modifying the same digital artifacts, do we lose that path to envision another's thought process?

One of the best narratives on Charles Babbage and his analytical inventions and his collaboration with Augusta Ada Kind, Countess of Lovelace can be found in James Gleick's, "The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood."

For the patent cognoscenti out there, it's interesting to consider how this clearly physical mechanical device, designed to handle algorithmic math complete with its physical input media, might be considered in light of business methods patents, patentability of algorithms, and the "it's not patentable if you can do it with a piece of paper and a pencil" argument in today's electrical computational discipline arena.