[HN Gopher] Show HN: View the patent and innovation history of a...
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Show HN: View the patent and innovation history of any company
Author : l7l
Score : 49 points
Date : 2021-11-05 12:10 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (goodip.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (goodip.io)
| _n_b_ wrote:
| I like it!
|
| I wish you could click on individual patents to see the full text
| of them, even if that was hosted elsewhere...
| l7l wrote:
| Thanks _n_b_, good point!
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| 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.
| have_faith wrote:
| 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.
| bjuly wrote:
| 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?
| sumtechguy wrote:
| 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.
| bjuly wrote:
| 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?
| echopurity wrote:
| Why would we every stop someone from owning all the ideas in
| the world?
| ccuqui wrote:
| 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.
| bjuly wrote:
| Hi ccuqui, Thank you for using GoodIP IQ to learn more about
| Amazon's patent strategy!
| greensoap wrote:
| 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).
| bjuly wrote:
| 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.
| 1cvmask wrote:
| 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.
| l7l wrote:
| Hi 1cvmask, we included assignees with more than 20 patents
| only. Could you give me some examples so that I can
| investigate?
| [deleted]
| M_True wrote:
| This tool looks amazing.Especially that you can super easily
| identify similar companies. This helps me for my current client
| project! Thanks
| l7l wrote:
| Hi M_True, thanks for the feedback! Great to hear. Let me know
| if you need anything else ;-)
| woodgrainz wrote:
| 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.
| l7l wrote:
| Hi woodgrainz. Thanks a lot for the feedback, we are about to
| fix this issue.
| echopurity wrote:
| Pretty sure this website tells the history of claims on imaginary
| property.
|
| Innovation is neither required nor common. That's a misconception
| that seems real when immersed in the ideology of this site.
| unwind wrote:
| 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.
| l7l wrote:
| 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.
| bluena wrote:
| Indeed, leaderboard per jurisdiction would be super
| interesting. IBM with 287000 patents would likely be in the top
| ones.
| ChrisKnott wrote:
| 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.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| But what do they do with them all? Seemingly not much...
| caseyscottmckay wrote:
| It's a defensive strategy, so others cannot enforce vague
| patents against them.
| kitd wrote:
| Master Inventor is a title that still carries a lot of
| esteem in IBM, albeit not the financial perks any more.
| bjuly wrote:
| 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
| missedthecue wrote:
| Impressive to see Union Carbide on the list, given that
| they haven't existed for 30 years.
| motohagiography wrote:
| 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.
| l7l wrote:
| 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
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| 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._
| "
| l7l wrote:
| 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.
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