AmberBlog

Searching for patents can be hard and risky. Patent applicant often use a variety of technical terms to describe a common concept, and patent examiners can use inconsistent patent codes for inventions in a given area. It is not surprising that many relevant patents are missed.

But what if instead you could draw upon the expertise and knowledge of other patents searchers in the same area? They might have used different keywords and patent codes, and found different patents. They might have found different patents to what you have found - and these different patents may be what you are looking for. This would be like getting a second opinion - and at little cost to yourself.

This of course is the underlying promise of citation searching, which is the basis of AmberScope, our new patent searching tool. To demonstrate this, we might try with a patent filed by Swiss watch company Swatch in 1999 for a Radio telephone timepiece including a SIM card., being US patent 6224254. This has the first claim of: 

A radio telephone watch intended to be used in a mobile communication system, said watch including a case and a wristband allowing said watch to be worn on the wrist,

wherein the watch further includes:

a casing associated with a first strand of said wristband and capable of receiving, in a removable manner, a SIM card (Subscriber Identity Module) allowing access to said mobile communication system;

an electronic module arranged in said watch case and allowing access to data stored in said SIM card; and

electric connection means between said SIM card and said electronic module, integrated in said first strand of the wristband.

Given the current interest in Google watches and iWatch, this could be a very valuable patent. But putting aside this potential for now, what could AmberScope tell us about this patent? In the image below, we show the results of a search for US6224254 within AmberScope.

This image below shows the patents connected as forward and backward citations to US6242454, as well as a few of the potentially most important indirect citations (ghost patents, shown in a faded view). There are only 22 patents shown - it does not take that long to review them individually.

Among the ghost patents found is US4847818 for a 'wrist watch telephone', filed by Timex in 1988. 

This was apparently missed by the examiner for the Swatch patent, but the examiner for US patent 5144599 filed by Junghans Uhren GmbH in 1990 for a Autonomous radio-controlled timepiece  did think that the Timex patent was worth considering. Of interest, this patent does not disclose a wrist phone at all, but instead a means of correcting the time displayed on the watch using a radio signal. This is a quite different invention.

Ordinarily, a patent searcher might say 'what value is this irrelevant patent?', but the value in this patent is that its examiner happened to find a relevant patent, namely the earlier Timex patent.

Since the Timex patent is so relevant, it is worth making this the centre of the network within AmberScope, using the 'more' button, which also shows that this patent has 135 additional forward or backward citations not shown in the map above.

If we start reviewing these patents with the "Next' button (the button on the bottom left of the screen that systematically works its way from the highest AmberScore value in the patent to the lowest), we soon come across US5889737 to Motorola (now owned by Google) filed in 1996.

And which discloses in part: 

The device 10 includes an electronic unit 12 intended to be worn, for example, on a user's wrist...The electronics necessary for making a watch, or for that matter, a portable cellular phone, two-way radio or selective radio receiver, such as a pager, are well known in the art, and may be incorporated into the electronic unit 12.

Or in other words, a watch phone. We could also refocus the network on this Motorola patent, but hopefully you have got the idea by now. As a matter of interest, this search was very fast, about 10 minutes start to finish.

Do this Motorola or Timex patent invalidate the Swatch patent? That is for other people to decide. But this point of this blog is that:

• The examiner for the swatch patent US6224254 did a patent search, and found one set of results - which included the Junghen patent.
• The examiner for the Junghen patent did another patent search, and found a second set of results, which included the Timex patent.
• The examiner for the Motorola patent did a third search, and found a third set of results - which included the Timex patent.

Each set of search results is different - which for the Junghans patent is completely understandable, as it is for a very different invention. But the beauty of using AmberScope is that a patent searcher can quickly and easily benefit from all of these searches, and by doing so, benefit from the collective intelligence of the searchers in the network.

Or in other words:

AmberScope can help patent searchers avoid the risk of missing patents already found by other searchers

And who wants to be the patent searcher that not only misses relevant patents, but misses relevant patents already found by other searchers?

Using AmberScope, by the way, does not mean that you should give up your traditional keyword and patent code searches - these still can be valuable. Instead, AmberScope can be used to further explore the 'neighbourhood' of the most promising patents you find using conventional methods to provide a second opinion.

Or, in other words:

Here at Ambercite we believe in the value of patent citation data to predict patent quality, but would not claim that this ability stretches to predicting Olympic medal counts.

In any case, there are a number of other analysts that are attempting to predict Olympic medal counts, see the excellent graphics found here. In this graphic, the predicted medal count for the US ranged from 82 (USA Today) to 113 (Price Waterhouse Coopers). These different groups in use a range of formulas are used, as discussed by The Economist. 

But who will be the best analyst?

While avoiding the risk of trying to predict medal counts ourselves, Ambercite might go out on a limb and make one prediction - that the average of the predicted values may be better, or similar to, the best of the individual predictions. This is based on the principle of collective wisdom, where the predictive ability of experts and non-experts alike can be improved by collecting a range of independent opinions and then averaging these opinions. While each opinion may be flawed in itself, the errors in each opinion is likely to be randomly distributed and an average of these opinions may be close to the truth.

So what has this got to do with patent analysis? Network Patent Analysis (NPA) is a method of ranking patent quality based on the citations connections of the patent to other patents around it, being forward and backward citaitons (and the forward and backward citations of the connected patents, and so on and so forth). Patent citations are not randomly or computer assigned, and instead each citation is an opinion that two patents are similar in some way. While individual citation opinions can be imperfect like any other individual opinion, if we collect enough of them the result should give us a very meaningful result.

NPA can be contrasted with other approaches. These typically tend to be:

• either a count of the forward citations from individual patents, which is only accessing part of the available citation data in an area of technology and so missing a lot o potentially valuable information.  
• combining these forward citation counts with what I have called 'prosecution measures' such as the number of family members for the patent, and whether the these patents have been renewed or not. This thinking behind this is is that prosecution measures reflect the value that the patent owner places on their patents.

The limitation of using prosecution measures is that they are based on the opinion of one person, namely the patent owner (or the IP manager within the patent owner). These patent owners are likely to be very careful, objective and relatively well informed in the decisions they make. On the other hand, they are just one opinion, and an opinion that may be influenced by other factors besides the quality of the patent, such as budget presssures, and imperfect information about the likely success of the protected invention. For example, consider the management of the same possibly valuable patent by a) a manager in a well-resourced and very profitable company and b) a smaller university. These two different types of owners are likely to use different management strategies, and for good reasons. These different approaches in turn would mean that a analyst using a prosecution type measure might draw very different conclusions about the same patent.

This is why we prefer network based measures such as NPA. The management of the patent will have an impact on the network, in particular the decision to filing similar family members. On other hand, NPA will look at a range of other opinions besides those of the patent owner, leading to a more rounded final assessment of the quality and influence of the patent. 

Interested in a robust and independent opinion of the quality of a group of patents of commercial interest to you? Please contact us for further information. 

Cover via Amazon

The collective intelligence of crowds is an increasingly recognised within the business community, partly inspired by the 2004 book on ‘The Wisdom of Crowds’ by New York journalist James Surowiecki. A number of examples of this collective wisdom are given, such as ability of a fairground crowd to estimate the weight of a bull in an agricultural fair (the average guess of the crowd was very close to the actual weight of the bull). And in the patent world some websites are being set up with the purpose of accessing this wisdom, for example by requesting that contributors help uncover prior art for patents being litigated.

But what if there was a way to tap into this collective wisdom of (patent) crowds without even asking them? And a method that also avoided the various risks of crowds as discussed in the now seminal 1841 book “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds”, by Scottish journalist James Mackay?

We believe that Network Patent Analysis (NPA) may be that method. As discussed on the Ambercite website, NPA analyses the collective intelligence of patent applicants as expressed by their choices to file patents for particular types of inventions. These opinions are grouped by patent citations. Up to a million patent citations can be analysed in an NPA study, and the result is a grouping and ranking of up to 250,000 patents. NPA is an objective means of grouping and summarising many subjective opinions.

But how can we be sure that NPA is drawing upon the wisdom and any the madness of (the patent filing) crowds? According to Surowiecki, a wise crowd shares the following characteristics:

•         Diversity of opinion

•         Independence of opinion

•         Decentralisation

•         A mechanism to aggregate diverse opinions of the crowd

Do patent applicants share the first three of these characteristics? It is easy to believe that, on the whole, patent applicants act and think independently of each other, particularly in commercially sensitive areas where they try not to share information with each other. Some of the independence of the patent data might be comprised by large organisations filing lots of patents in some areas, but important technology areas are full of patents filed by a range of different and competing organisations.

And as for the fourth characteristic, aggregation of opinions, this is exactly what NPA does. NPA aggregates vast amounts of patent citation data to create a collective opinion on grouping and ranking of patents and their related technologies.

Want to know more? Check out our white papers available on the Griffith Hack or Ambercite websites, or download copies of reports including a recently prepared analysis of a new patent litigation against hybrid car market leader Toyota, along with our popular report on litigated smartphone patents. All reports are now available without registration – but feel free to contact us if you would like to apply the benefit of NPA to your business.