Show HN: View the patent and innovation history of any company | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: View the patent and innovation history of any company

goodip.io

65 pointsl7l33 comments

I've noticed a recent uptick in suspect 'new companies' debuting on HN. By that I mean I think someone is testing what sorts of company ideas, products, etc. gain traction with the HN audience, but to what end, I'm not sure...

GoodIP's Twitter presence is limited to a MatthewBunchOfNumbers username... https://twitter.com/Matthew99770523/status/11792742969480683...

I checked a number of companies that I know that have IP and patents and they came out empty. Maybe it is only accurate for public companies? Or maybe just partially accurate?

This seems to be more of a partial source and not a definitive resource.

Hi 1cvmask, we included assignees with more than 20 patents only. Could you give me some examples so that I can investigate?

Cool!

My first search ("bosch") turned up almost a quarter of a million in the main company. Waay more than e.g. Ericsson, Milwaukee, Ryobi, Microsoft and Google which I searched next.

Is there a "leaderboard" page?

Edit: found the top lists at the bottom, but I don't want to pick a category, and the list format shows list position but not patent count unless you click each entry, which to me was not very accessible.

Indeed, leaderboard per jurisdiction would be super interesting. IBM with 287000 patents would likely be in the top ones.

I did an internship at IBM (~15 years ago) and they said that not only does IBM have the most patents, it tries to have the most patents awarded every year. You could just send half arsed ideas to a team of lawyers and they would write it up into a proper patent.

Getting patents in your name was a big part of moving up the internal engineering ladder.

But what do they do with them all? Seemingly not much...

It's a defensive strategy, so others cannot enforce vague patents against them.

Master Inventor is a title that still carries a lot of esteem in IBM, albeit not the financial perks any more.

We have a leaderboard per country. IBM is indeed No.1 for the US: https://goodip.io/iq/top/offices/us

The all-time leaderboards for each industry and each technology are here: https://goodip.io/iq/top/industries https://goodip.io/iq/top/technologies

Impressive to see Union Carbide on the list, given that they haven't existed for 30 years.

Hi unwind, thanks for the feedback. We do actually have leadership pages per industry, technology and patent office. E.g. https://goodip.io/iq/top/technologies or https://goodip.io/iq/top/industries. Cleantech innovation categories are going to follow soon.

There's an issue with data concordance (I think that's the term) in that, for example, Snekma is listed as having a few RU patents but that's actually the same company as SNECMA (French aeronautical company) which is listed as having many more patents; but that company is now known as Safran.

A proper historical analysis of companies would need to account for mergers/splits/renames of companies themselves - data which is only really able to be inferred (at best) from patent sources. You'll need company merger records etc..

I wonder if they're also handling misspellings in company data? (Eg Bpsch instead of Bosch, this sort of thing does sometimes get printed on patent documents).

Chinese company names are one of the harder cases, I feel, for example Edwards (pump manufacturer) presence in China appears to go by "Aidehua Vacuum" (which seems to be a roman-script Chinese transliteration of Edwards Vacuum).

It's a hard problem to attend but I think you're going to miss a lot of detail in company-focused analysis if you don't tackle it.

This is all personal opinion and in no way relates to my work."

Hi pbhjpbhj, thanks for the feedback. I think at the moment company name disambiguation, especially with patents is an unsolved problem. There are easier tasks such as cleaning typos and company name changes, but then as you mentioned - mergers, splits etc. Which companies with exactly the same name but in different countries are the same? And in most cases ownership changes of the patents are not even tracked. Thats why we decided to do some preprocessing, but did not try to solve this problem by now.

Microsoft seems to hold something over 100,000 worldwide (their main company and through their licensing company). Is there any logic in limiting the number of patents a company can hold? at what point do you simply have too many? is there such a thing as a monopoly from a purely intellectual property perspective?. Just thinking out loud.

Some are defensive some are offensive. Someone like Qualcomm uses them to get a percentage of every device but also uses them to protect themselves against other companies, as they also sell chipsets. Also patents expire. So they may have one but after the time limit they are not really worth much anymore other than a defense. Would limiting the number they hold really help? Think one chipset they had to pull was over some what most people would consider the most tiny of features. Plus limiting would not really put a dent in many of these companies I am sure they would think of some way around it.

Good point, sumtechguy! I agree limiting numbers might not really help. However, giving startups the tools to understand the patent game might help a lot. What do you think?

The tools unfortunately are not good. As it is a wild mix of case law, actual law, and cherry picked venues. Then add into that different patent government/private regulatory bodies that enforce it unevenly, too much or not at all. Most of the companies I have worked at they had the process down pretty good. But if I remember right the average to get one was 2-3 years, with a few dozen rejections in there. Most of that was getting the verbiage right to make it sound unique and have proper claims. But if you wanted to make it easier for people to do it you would have to probably convince a patent attorney to help write it up and how to make it work, and defend it. This is not really a 'software' problem but more of a people/process/politics problem.

Hi have_faith, Great question! That's one of the reasons we built GoodIP IQ: It can give everyone insights into the secret patent universe. And you are correct: Does it really make sense to have so many patents? How can startups deal with 100,000 patents just at Microsoft?

I got curious and went to consult Amazon's patents. Among several others, in the same line, I found this one in particular: WO2020264431A1 2020-06-26 Connection pooling for scalable network services. I visited the patent page: https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2020264431A1/en And essentially it's the (detailed) description of how a connection pool works. "Ipsis litteris" !!! Is it just me who thinks this kind of patent is simply nonsense? IMHO, the only purpose of this type of patent is to intimidate or trolling other companies with less money to spend on giant legal departments and non-sense patent disputes.

I'm not going to comment on the substance of the application, I have no idea.

I just wanted to point out that A1 at the end of this document means this is JUST a published application.

One would need to find each "GRANTED" application that claims priority to this application to find any patents. Then one would need to read the claims on each patent to really know what it covers.

The WO at the beginning means it was filed with WIPO first, which is not any particular country. WIPO is the World Intellectual Property Organization. This is an application process that makes it simpler to go to multiple countries, but every country has its own process (the EU countries have more synergy in the process and their own EP process).

Hi greensoap, you are correct that Amazon patent application is not GRANTED as of yet. If there is a B at the end of the document number, it is GRANTED.

Hi ccuqui, Thank you for using GoodIP IQ to learn more about Amazon's patent strategy!

FYI: The formatting/rendering of this page is way off for me (Chrome on 16" Mac). The top of the page is missing, and the bottom is cut off and doesn't scroll. Need to look at your UI again.

Hi woodgrainz. Thanks a lot for the feedback, we are about to fix this issue.

Without expecting any results I looked up Nike to see what was coming out and they have plenty of patents. Then I looked at adidas, same thing. That's crazy! https://goodip.io/iq/assignee/adidas-ag

Holy crap this is powerful. Is the company simlarity done using a clustering measurement on the corpus of language in the patents? I can't think of a product manager whose job does will not depend on this.

Hi motohagiography, thanks a lot for the kind feedback, much appreciated. I built profiles for each company based on their filing strategy and technology and then in a second step computed their similarity using Pearson. If you are interested in the details, I put together some of the details here https://medium.com/goodip/ding-the-pearson-correlation-matri... Cheers Linus

This tool looks amazing.Especially that you can super easily identify similar companies. This helps me for my current client project! Thanks

Hi M_True, thanks for the feedback! Great to hear. Let me know if you need anything else ;-)

I like it!

I wish you could click on individual patents to see the full text of them, even if that was hosted elsewhere…

Thanks _n_b_, good point!

I agree, it would be great to be able to read the full text of a patent (or a link to full text).

If you are looking for feeedback, it would be an absolute killer feature if you can extract the patent 'claims' from the full text and have the option of expanding only 'patent claims' from an entry on the patent 'List' shown for a given company.

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