Michelle Tallin wrote on 8/16/2007 9:02 AM:
> I've been ploughing through a lot of US applications lately to create
> competitive analyses and I've noticed that many US Patent
> Applications do not have Assignee information on them - just inventor
> and attorney.
>
> I presume this is either a) an oversight or b) a ploy by companies not
> to divulge who's patenting the application
>
> Does anyone have any background on why the Assignee information is
> often missing?
>
> Of course it isn't exactly hard to find out who has filed for the
> application - if you don't have equivalents then all you need to do is
> an inventor search. It's just rather time consuming and annoying to
> have to go through that process for a whole bunch of patents
>
You are talking about published US patent applications?
As a general matter, a published US patent application will *never*
shown an assignee, except under certain extremely rare circumstances.
Basically, unless an Application Data Sheet has been filed that
specifically lists an assignee, USPTO will not show any assignee
information on the published application.
No law or rule or anything else requires that an applicant file an ADS.
And if no ADS is filed, no assignee will be listed.
For example an applicant can file a "long-form" oath that contains some
of the information that would have been in the ADS, and this will
relieve the applicant of any obligation to file an ADS.
Even if an applicant files an ADS, there is no requirement that the
applicant include assignee information on the ADS. No law or rule or
anything else requires the applicant to provide assignee information on
the ADS. If you were to look a hundred randomly selected ADSs in
various US patent files, what you would see is that *most* of them do
not contain assignee information. It is extra work to complete those
fields, and as there is no requirement to complete them, many filers
skip over those fields.
Thus there is no "ploy" going on here.
You mention using equivalents or inventor searches to try to find
published applications assigned to a particular assignee. But by far
the easier way is simply to do the assignee search on the USPTO web site.
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Received on Tue Nov 20 2007 - 08:51:42
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