1997 Software patent statistics - Feb. to Jul.
For the six month period of February to July 1997, 5400 US software
patents issued, well on the way to my beginning of the year prediction of
11,000 software patents. To put this in perspective, here are statistics for
the past few years:
1997 11000
1996 9000 (estimated)
1995 6100
1994 4500
1993 2400
1992 1600
1991 1500
1990 1300
Tremendous growth with no relationship to the minimal revolutionary innovation
of the software industry. The PTO estimates that about 37,000 software
patent applications will be received in 1997, so figure about 16,000 of these
issuing circa 1999. Given the patents that have issued to date, there will
be about 80,000 active US software patents by the year 2000. Get ready to
be sued.
How well are these patents being examined? For yet another year, over
50% of these patents cite no non-patent prior art, the average patent citing
only 3.1 non-patent prior art items, which is woefully inadequate, since
there are dozens of highly relevant non-patent prior art items for most of
the patents being issued. Rule 56 is still toilet paper. Some numbers:
Number of non-patent Percentage of issued
prior art citations software patents
-------------------- --------------------
0 51
1 14
2-3 15
4-10 15
>10 5
Less than five percent of the patents cite even half of the relevant amount
of prior art. As I shall argue later this week, bibliographically this
means software patents should be presumed to be invalid.
One question I am often asked is who does a good job submitting non-patent
prior art. Good question, very few answers. One of the few companies I
can compliment is Caterpillar - they consistently send in good amounts of
prior art with their patents. The hardware and software industries should
be ashamed that a group of guys in overalls picking their teeth with hay
do a better job with their software patent practices. Kudos to Caterpillar.
And for the record, Fonix Corporation submitted the most non-patent prior
art, 320 items for patent number 5,640,490, which I am sure the examiner
had plenty of time to read and digest.
Who is getting the patents? For the most part, it is American and
Japanese companies and individuals:
United States 63%
Japan 26%
Germany 2%
United Kingdom 1%
France 1%
Sweden 1%
Canada 1%
Korea 1%
Everyone else 4%
Europe has yet to appreciate the trade barrier potential of software
patents, and EC bureaucrats better be more willing to spend money to deal
with this problem. Currently they are dragging their feet, to the great
disadvantage of the European software industry. And at least for software,
EPO does just as bad an examination job as the PTO - the EPO's better
reputation cannot be extended to software patents.
Company-wise, there are some very interesting trends happening, with
large numbers of changes in my top 50 lists. First, for the first time,
two "software" companies made the top 10 list, Microsoft at number 8, and
Apple at number 10. The next closest is Borland at number 47, so for the
most part, the software industry is still being dwarfed by the hardware
industry in terms of software patents. As hardware continues to become
commoditized, look out for hardware companies seeking income by asserting
their software patents (March 17 Business Week has a nice article about
IBM going after many in Silicon Valley).
IBM, still number one in (invalid) software patents, though its percentage
is dropping. For years, IBM had been getting about 9 percent of the
software patents, though in 1997 it dropped down to about 7 percent. This
means there are more holes in IBM's picket fences, to the extent that IBM
could start getting harassed by other software patents to a level that IBM
would see the light and support efforts for quality over quantity. ATT
dropped out of the top 10, with its spinoff Lucent taking its place.
Automobile companies continue their rise (Ford, Chrysler, Toyota, Honda),
as microprocessors take over more roles in controlling your car.
370 IBM
136 Canon
127 Lucent Technologies
122 Motorola
121 Fujitsu
115 Hitachi
84 Xerox/Fuji Xerox
81 Microsoft
77 NEC
68 Apple Computer
67 Mitsubishi
57 Intel
54 Sony
53 Toshiba
53 Hewlett-Packard
52 Matsushita Electric
46 Honda
43 Eastman Kodak
41 Digital Equipment Corporation
38 Nikon Corporation
37 Toyota
36 Siemens Aktiengesselschaft
36 Ricoh
36 Ford Motor
35 Yamaha
34 Sun Microsystems
33 U.S. Philips
33 Caterpillar
30 Fuji Photo
28 Samsung Electronics
28 General Electric
27 Texas Instruments
24 Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson
22 U.S. Navy
20 Unisys
20 Trimble Navigation
20 Robert Bosch GmbH
20 Compaq Computer
19 LSI Logic
18 Sharp Kabushiki Kaisha
18 Nissan Motor
18 Hughes Electronics
17 Pitney Bowes
17 Olympus Optical
15 Seiko Epson
15 Nippondenso
15 Borland International
15 Bell Atlantic
15 AT&T
15 Advanced Micro Devices
14 Taligent/Object Technology Licensing Corp
14 Honeywell
14 Chrysler
14 Brother Kogyo
14 SAIC/Bell Communications Research
13 NTT
12 VLSI Technology
11 National Semiconductor
What's being patented? Everything still for the most part. Networking
patents increasingly dominate, with automobile patents continuing their
steady rise. Two new categories appear this year, Agricultural and
Internet. Tomorrow I will show there are over 1000 pending Internet patents
at the PTO - interference city. Optics is also becoming popular, with the
camera and copier companies getting lots of software patents.
1063 Networking/Communications
675 Operating systems
652 Image processing
548 Automobiles/Vehicles
400 Graphics
371 Graphical User Interfaces/HCI
356 Optics
353 Process Controll
341 Engineering
302 Signal Processing
256 Medical
243 Security
227 Office Automation
198 CAE/Digital-Analog Circuit Design
196 Databases
195 Biology
175 Entertainment/Multimedia
168 Physics
167 Computer Aided Software Engineering
161 Finance
157 Navigation
138 Distributed Processing/Client-Server
135 Pattern Recognition
123 Word Processing
121 Chemistry
116 Speech Recognition and Synthesis
105 Computer Aided Design
101 Compression
91 Geophysical/Exploration
90 Manufacturing
85 Games
66 Character Recognition
66 Neural Networks
61 Natural Language Processing
61 Music
59 Numerical Analysis
56 Object Oriented
54 Artificial Intelligence
49 Robotics
47 Algorithms
38 Multiprocessing
33 Parallel Processing
26 Agriculture
24 Education
22 Simulation
21 Fuzzy Logic
15 Genetic Programming/Sequencing
14 Vision
13 Virtual Reality
11 Internet
9 Spreadsheets
Who is examining these patents? About two thirds are still being handled
by the Computing/Communications megagroup of Groups 2300, 2400 and 2600,
but other groups are handling one third of the software patents, a large
number for which some of these other groups are not qualified to examine.
Further I am seeing evidence of some companies filing most software ideas
written in such a way that it is handled by the non-software/hardware
groups.
Group 2300 25%
Group 2600 23%
Group 2400 15%
Group 2200 9%
Group 2500 7%
Group 3300 6%
Group 2100 6%
Group 3400 3%
Group 1300 1%
Group 3100 1%
Group 3500 1%
Other groups 3%
I am starting to become more sympathetic with the Groups on their predicament,
which is pretty much being asked to produce crap. My only major complaint is
the PTO's support of the fraudulent, unethical, incompetent, out-of-place,
retirement home called the Software Patent Institute (so I get a diatribe in).
How about other countries? Based on filings, my rough estimate is that
there are twice as many Japanese software patents as there are US, though
the Japanese patents tend to be these short, low number of claims, patents.
My other guess is that there are about half as many European software
patents as US. China is a big unknown, with more patents than Japan.
All together, as we enter the next century, there should be about 300,000
active software patents around the world. Busting them will be my pension
plan.
Greg Aharonian
Internet Patent News Service