How can you get a patent?

How can I get the patent count for each US company?

• The US Patent and Trademark Office already provides a public online search tool to look up the patents for each assignee.  However, the tool requires searching for one company at a time.  Is there already a summarized list available somewhere that shows the total cumulative number of patents assigned to each US company?  The USPTO publishes the top assignees each year who are issued at least 40 utility patents during the calendar year.  I'm looking for a complete list including companies with less than 40 patents issued each year.

• Answer:

  You will require a subscription to a competent commercial patent database, such as Thomson Innovation.  You can quickly search for patents in a given duration (for example, those that were filed in last twenty years to get approximate number of valid patents) and analyse those to see the companies.  Data can be exported in spreadsheet format wherein you can use MS Excel's in-built functions such as Pivot Tables to organize this data.  Once you have these tools, many interesting insights can be drawn on not only USPTO data, but also the worldwide patent data. A list of such commercial databases is available here: http://www.intellogist.com/wiki/Compare:Patent_Search_System As far as freely available patent data is concerned, you can get most updated global patent information at Espacenet (http://worldwide.espacenet.com/). If you are willing to code and use the free patent data, the best option is to use Open Patent Services (OPS) from European Patent Organization. http://www.epo.org/searching/free/ops.html In case you are looking for the most recent information from USPTO, you can develop a VBA (or any other similar language) tool to extract the latest assignment data from the USPTO Assignment database: http://assignments.uspto.gov/assignments/?db=pat We, at Hourglass Research (http://www.hourglassresearch.com) carry out a number of interesting patent analytics projects and this is often a very basic step in those. If interested, you can contact me at ojas [at] hourglassresearch [dot] com.  Cheers.