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7 posts
penguinswarrior
Last seen: 04/19/2022 - 13:08
Joined: 03/21/2022 - 17:11
match pre-grant application and (raw) assignee

Dear Community and PatentsView-Team,

I have a question about matching the pre-grant application and the assignees:

I merge the pre-grant application and the "rawassignee" data using the document id. By doing so, about half of the document numbers from the pre-grant application are not matched, and the number of unmatched document IDs is a lot higher after 2014. Does this sound right? Since the raw assignee data contains individuals as well, what does it mean if an application is not matched to any assignee? Thank you so much and sorry in advance if the question has been answered before or is trivial. 

Thu, 03/31/2022 - 15:58
PVTeam
Role: moderator
Last seen: 04/24/2024 - 12:31
Joined: 10/17/2017 - 10:47
applications without assignees

This does sound right, yes.

An assignee is not a required component of an application or patent, and it is not uncommon for applications or patents to have no assignee or to have assignees added or changed after the date of application or grant. We estimate that at this time there is no assignee associated with roughly 50% of the applications and roughly 10% of the patents in our data. There is a decline in the rate of assignment of applications around late 2014.

To confirm the accuracy of the data we ran a check on a few hundred randomly selected document numbers that are in applications.tsv and not in rawassignee.tsv, and found that none of them have an assignee reported on USPTO's Patent Application Full Text Database.

Put simply, the presence of an assignee on an application or patent means that ownership or interest of a patent is being transferred in whole or in part from one party to another. If a patent or application has no assignee, the ownership of the patent or application likely lies with its applicant(s) and/or inventor(s). More complete and detailed information on the legal definitions of ownership and assignment can be found in the Patent Laws, Regulations, Policies & Procedures section of USPTO's website (See Section 301 Ownership/Assignability of Patents and Applications [R-10.2019] ). 

Best,
PVTeam

Fri, 04/01/2022 - 15:13
penguinswarrior
Last seen: 04/19/2022 - 13:08
Joined: 03/21/2022 - 17:11
RE: APPLICATIONS WITHOUT ASSIGNEES

Thank you so much for your detailed response!

Mon, 04/04/2022 - 01:02
penguinswarrior
Last seen: 04/19/2022 - 13:08
Joined: 03/21/2022 - 17:11
decline in the assignment rate

Sorry for another follow-up question: do you know what led to the decline in the rate of assignment of applications in 2014? THanks so much!

Tue, 10/25/2022 - 00:35
jiashuof
Last seen: 10/25/2022 - 00:33
Joined: 10/25/2022 - 00:32
I'm also seeing the same…

I'm also seeing the same decline in the data, so any insights would be helpful. I know the assignment of applications can be sensitive to many factors.

Wed, 02/15/2023 - 16:43
economist
Last seen: 02/21/2023 - 12:23
Joined: 02/15/2023 - 16:24
Combining assignee data from applications and granted patents

Dear all,

I also found the issue of missing assignees in the application data puzzling. But there seems to be a way to get more information on assignees by using data on granted patents. It would be helpful if the PatentsView Team could confirm the validity of the method I describe below and/or explain what is happening. 

When merging the application data with the assignee data ("pg_assignee_disambiguated") on "pgpub_id" I obtained the following shares of applications with assignees for years after 2010:

Year,  Share of apps with assignees

2010    0.65
2011    0.67
2012    0.71
2013    0.71
2014    0.48
2015    0.28
2016    0.31
2017    0.31
2018    0.32
2019    0.31
2020    0.32
2021    0.33
2022    0.33

As OP described, the shares are rather low and drop in 2014.

However, when merging the assignees of applications that are turned into granted patents (merging "g_assignee_disambiguated" on patent_id), I obtain much higher rates, and these rates remain consistently high (see table below). This suggests that many of the missing assignees in the pre-grant data are associated with applications that are eventually granted, for which we have assignee information in the grant data.

Year, Share of apps with assignees (pre-grant + grant data)

2010    0.83
2011    0.84
2012    0.86
2013    0.86
2014    0.80
2015    0.77
2016    0.78
2017    0.79
2018    0.77
2019    0.69
2020    0.51
2021    0.36
2022    0.33

Wed, 03/15/2023 - 10:14
PVTeam
Role: moderator
Last seen: 04/24/2024 - 12:31
Joined: 10/17/2017 - 10:47
America Invents Act

Hello all, 

Our team suspects this observed drop is a result of the America Invents Act implementation that allowed organizations to be listed as applicants without needing to be listed as an assignee.

Thanks,
PVTeam