In order to ‘catch the wave’ of CNT technology, firms in the semiconductor industry will need to morph their business model to accommodate competition and new opportunities. The reason that I say “morph” the business model, instead of radically change it, is because the shift to CNT from silicon is not here yet, it is a long process forthcoming, and the shift will entail many years of extensive forecasting and planning. The stakes are high for semiconductor developers and manufacturers, so a careful balance between maintaining strong revenue streams, and investing it into R&D is more realistic strategy than a ‘flip the switch’ type of strategy. Although it is less likely that a new player will suddenly emerge onto the field and eat lunches (like Netflix is doing in online media) because of the high barrier to entry, patent activity should be carefully monitored and assessed to judge the relative…
Patents
Here are the results of a regression comparison of all software litigation and all software patenting activity since 2000. The results show correlation which could be described as somewhere between moderate and strong. The resulting Peason’s R value for this study is 0.5193. The purpose of doing this regression study is to prove some correlation between litigation and R&D expenditure. Patent grants issued are not a direct measure of R&D expenditure, because patents costs different amounts to produce in different industries. However, these are all software-related classes, and so correlation between grants issued and R&D expenditure should be stronger than when measuring all UPC classes for the whole USPTO. PastedGraphic-1.pdf
Here are two charts to show the proportion of software patent grants of all patent grants issued by year since 2008, and software patent grants share of all litigation since 2008. Both are increasing at a steady rate. These facts correspond with the importance of software in corporate strategy in the past decade. Software has also dominated M&A deals in terms of value and volume. Figure 1: Patent Grants from software-related UPC subclasses as a share of all patent grants issued (2008-2012) Figure 2: Patent Grants from software-related UPC subclasses as a share of all patent litigation (2008-2012)
Luxgen is a new Taiwanese independent auto brand seeking to grow and add market share in Taiwan and abroad. Luxgen has shown propensity towards selling intelligent automobiles in a global market. More broadly, in the US autonomous vehicles have been licensed for testing in two US states to date, and Google’s Sergey Brin has publicly predicted that autonomous vehicles will be ready for market in 5 years. Luxgen is owned by parent company Hon Hai Precision Industry Ltd. Hon Hai has started to accumulate patents related to autonomous vehicles starting in 2010 and their transportation related patent awards and their details are below in Figure 2 and Table 4. Secondly, top litigated software UPC classes for 2012 include several classes related to transportation technology. These litigation trends indicate that technological innovation in the transportation industry is high-value at this time. Figure: Hon Hai Transportation Related Patent Grants by Award Year…
NOTE: The USPC to CPC concordance pages mentioned in the original post are not available via the USPTO website anymore. So, I have posted the CSV of the concordance below. You can download the CSV here: https://www.ripplesoftware.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/uspc-cpc.csv OLD POST The USPC to CPC statistical concordance table is available on the USPTO website:http://www.uspto.gov/web/patents/classification/index.htm The only problem is that it’s nearly impossible to download all the tables because they are all on separate pages. Here is a web-scraping python script to download all the tables for all USPC and create a CSV file. The script is available here and requires the BeautifulSoup library: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/45852891/UPC-CPCconcordance1000.py The parsed CSV file is available here: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/45852891/uspc-cpc.csv The CSV includes the first 5 related CPC codes as columns and can be opened in excel or imported into a database. Cheers!
Click on the image below to see the full report: Link to Annual Report of Software Patent Litigation for 2012: https://www.ripplesoftware.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/annual-report-data-1.jpg Link to PwC 2012 M&A Outlook: http://www.pwc.com/en_US/us/transaction-services/publications/assets/pwc-technology-mergers-acquisitions-q4-2011-outlook.pdf Link to PwC 2012 Patent Litigation Report: http://www.pwc.com/en_US/us/forensic-services/publications/assets/2012-patent-litigation-study.pdf Link to PwC 2012 China M&A Outlook: http://www.pwcblogs.be/transactions/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/2012-China-MA-Review-and-Outlook.pdf
Technology cycle time is a measure of the pace of technological turnover by measuring the average age of patent citations. The following table shows the UPC subclasses with the fastest moving TCT for 2010. Only subclasses that have received at least 100 patent grants during 2010 are included. Results show communications IT, big data, vehicles navigation, computer conferencing constitute most of the classes.
Which of the top automakers is leading the software patenting charge towards autonomous vehicles? This chart shows which automakers have been acquiring patents since 2007. Looks like Honda and GM are really collecting the most patents with Nissan in the number 3 position. Expectedly data processing for vehicle navigation is by far the run-away top software UPC for patenting by most auto makers.
The first chart below shows the probability that a patent will become litigated for the whole USPTO (blue), commercial and business software IPC G06Q (red), and the total G06Q patent issued per year from 1990-2011. The chart tells the story pretty clearly. That is, software patents have a much higher possibility of litigation than average for the whole USPTO. Also, commercial software patenting is increasing significantly to over 3000 patents per year. In this data model probability is calculated by the number of litigated patents each year divided by a cumulative total of issued patents in each category starting in 1976. While patenting is increasing, litigation is increasing faster. The actual probabilities may be slightly higher than shown here considering that the cumulative totals are run from 1976 until the calculated year. The second chart showing the average age of litigated patents for the entire USPTO and G06Q show that…
The uncertainty in the dragons den of software patents may be driving many countries away from competing for patents. This is perhaps bad news for the US and further evidence that software patents restrict innovation. Considering that only 12.9% of software patents hold up upon litigation ( The study was carried out by John R. Allison, Mark A. Lemley & Joshua Walker for McCombs Graduate School of Business, University of Texas at Austin). The data are actually quite staggering. The chart above shows that the US holds approximately 55% of all USPTO patents in existence. On the other hand, The US holds almost 70% of all software patents in the US and even more staggeringly 85% of all business and commercial software patents.
