AmberBlog

Invention never happens in a vacuum, and instead tends to build on earlier work done by either the inventor or other inventors. It is possible to track this 'knowledge flow' by looking at patent citations, which may be among the most reliable sources of innovation related data. While some other patent analysis techniques also analyse patent citations, NPA adds two improvements to this process:

• Only citations between patents in the study of interest are considered. Some broad patents have disclosures that may be relevant to a number of different fields. However, NPA is focused on finding the strongest patents within a specific field of interest, and so only takes relevant patent citations into account.
• In any case, patent citations are not treated equally. NPA has a process for weighting patent citations, and these weighted patent citations are used when assessing the relative importance of patents.

There are many other potential applications for knowledge flow analysis, including patent litigation. In the recently released report Clearing the fog: Patenting trends for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease, we have investigated which patents have had the strongest influence on other patents in this field. Clearing the fog identifed 23 clusters of patenting activity, which in turn formed into two groupings of clusters, which we names the Amyloid Grouping and Tau Grouping in relation to the proteins these patents were targeting. The top three foundation patents, or most influential, in each grouping of clusters is shown in the Table.

This table shows some interesting results. The most influential patent in the Amyloid Grouping, the now expired US4666829 filed by the University of California, discloses the Alzheimer's Amyloid Polypeptide (AAP) which is the precursor of beta amyloid, and had 94 forward citations in the dataset. The next most influential patent was the number one ranked NPA patent of all.

In the Tau Grouping, the two most influential patents, US7265148 and US7332521, were both invented by Baihua Hu, a principle scientist at Pfizer, and refer to substituted pyrrole-indoles.

It should be noted that this type of analysis should not be confused with the general NPA patent ranking process, which also takes into account other measures of patent 'popularity'. Nonetheless analysis of foundation patents can help provide a unique perspective on the history of a technology, and its key influences and influencers.

(This blog post was based on material previously presented in the Clearing the fog report: used with permission)

Ambercite is very proud to be associated with the latest Griffith Hack NPA white paper Clearing the fog: Patenting trends for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease, which was released today. In this white paper Griffith Hack, working very closely with and applying the Network Patent Analysis (NPA) process developed by Ambercite, analyses over 48,000 patents to fiilter, cluster and rank these patents. Two separate NPA maps accompany the white paper, one NPA map showing an cluster focused patent landscape map, and one NPA map showing a time scale patent landscape map.

Clearing the fog is also the best publically available demonstration yet of the powerful ability of NPA to precisely cluster patents with a precision unavailable with keyword or IPC patent code clustering. While we have seen this precise clustering for the majority of the confidential NPA client studies we have delivered, this degree of clustering is stronger than in our previous two NPA white papers on hybrid car and smartphone patents.

Clearing the fog also also demonstrates several other features of NPA:

• the power of associative searching (page 5)
• the value of a NPA time scale map (page 15, and available as a separate download)
• the concept of foundation patents (page 16)
• the ability of NPA to identify what could important future patents (page 17)
• and even some natural limitations of NPA (page 21)

As well as a detailed discussion of the leading patents, patent owners and inventors in the area of Alzheimer's disease, an increasing important disease which may impact many of our elderly and the people that care for them.

Interested in learning more, or how NPA can be applied into your business? Come back to us, and we can share more about the NPA process and deliverables. 

An issue that we encounter from time to time is where clients ask:

         Can Network Patent Analysis (NPA) predict claim quality?

As we all know, claims are one of the key aspects of any patent. A well drafted claim will be broad enough to provide a good degree of protection for the invention being patented, yet narrow enough to avoid the prior art. Experienced patent attorneys take great care in drafting claims, knowing that, if the patent is ever litigated, the legal teams from both sides will sweat over every word in the claims. In addition, judges will base judgements that could be worth many millions on these same words. Claim quality also gets determined when the claim is referenced to competing products – a given set of claims may precisely read onto a competing, similar product, whilst it entirely misses a second competing and similar product. For good reasons, opinions regarding infringement of a given patent claim are best given by skilled attorneys and patent lawyers.

Given the importance of the wording of patent claims, it would be a big ask for a fully objective approach like NPA to predict claim quality. And for this very reason, Ambercite is careful to avoid suggesting that we can predict claim quality.

Having said that, a patent can, in simple terms, also be considered as a public disclosure in addition to the legal monopoly as defined by the claims. And underlying this disclosure is the invention being protected. Assuming that the patent owner is using skilled patent attorneys/agents to draft its patents, a 'better' (e.g. more innovative, valuable, novel) invention should bring with it the basis for stronger claims and hence stronger legal protection.

The relationship between invention quality and legal quality can be expressed by the figure below. A higher quality invention brings with the potential for stronger claims that take advantage of the breadth of the invention. It is the role of the patent attorney to maximise the legal quality of the patent by drafting strong claims based the quality of the invention.

Figure: Two alternative definitions of patent quality

Unlike legal quality, we believe that 'invention quality' can be predicted using NPA, for one or both of two reasons:

1. Important inventions are more likely to attract imitators (or even improvements by the same applicant) and this will increase the number of forward citation connections.
2. Broad inventions (or at least claims to a broad invention) may well attract a large number of backward citations during examination.

A greater number of forward or backward citations should help to increase the influence of the patent within the patent network, and so increase its NPA ranking and predicted quality. In turn, a high quality invention brings with it the potential for high quality claims and a legally strong patent. It will remain the role of the skilled patent attorney or patent lawyer to interpret the strength of the patent claims, but NPA can help this skilled professional understand the quality of the underlying invention.

The above figure also helps to explain what happens to the 'quality' of a patented invention once the patent expires (or is abandoned). Legally, an expired patent has little value. However an expired patent publication can still be a record of a high quality invention, and this can continue to influence the field around it. Similarly, a patent only ever filed in the US can still influence its field of technology in other countries, such as during patent prosecution, litigation or research.

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Brian Dodson of Dodson Consutants has written an interesting blog this week on the US Supreme Court judgement  Global-Tech Appliances, Inc. v. SEB S.A. Readers can refer to his blog for the details of the case so I won't repeat them here, apart from a couple of key facts:

• A defendent in a patent infringement case asked their attorney for a freedom to operate study, but failed to tell the attorney that they had copied an existing product. Their attorney in turn failed to find a granted US patent protecting the existing product;
• The defendent then argued a lack of willful infringement because they were unaware of the granted US patent.

But I find the conclusions thought-provoking:

• Induced infringement under §271(b) (of the US Patent Act) requires knowledge that the induced acts constitute patent infringement; 
• Having decided that actual knowledge is required, the Court then added that 'willful blindness' is legally equivalent to actual knowledge.

Willfull blindness, or deliberate indifference, is hence clearly not always a defence to willful infringement. In other words, ignorance is not neccessarily bliss....

Worried about other patents in your area? Contact us to discuss how Network Patent Analysis (NPA) can objectively review up to 250,000 patents in two weeks, and identify relevant technology clusters and the leading patents in your area using our sophisticated and unique algorithms. Attorneys are welcome to speak to us and our associates Griffith Hack about related privilege issues.

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Becoming a tennis professional and touring the world sounds like a great way to make a living, but like many ways to make money, the rewards are far from evenly distributed. For example, Tennis.com can tell you that the Serbian Novak Djokovic leads Spaniard Rafael Nadal as the leading money earner for the ATP tour. Novak has earned over $10 million in the last 12 months compared to the $6.4 million earned by Rafael. In contrast 99th ranked Frederico Gil of Portugal earned has earned $292,000 this season, a mere $2,000 ahead of Jeremy Chardy of France.

When we look at this distribution of earnings, Figure 1, we can see that they fit into a power law distribution (great blog post by John Hagel), which has a strong bias toward the top earners, but then shows a flattening off for the lower ranked players.

Power law distributions are also quite common in business, including for patent and portfolio values. For example, the Network Patent Analysis (NPA) being developed by Ambercite has the ability to assign rankings, and patent scores to individual patents, using such powerlaw algorithms. Different patent owners can be compared in terms of their patent portfolio score. In Figure 2, we compare the relative rankings in three different fields of patent ownership (smartphones, hybrid cars and Alzheimer treatments) to the power law curve we have just seen for men’s tennis players.

Figure 2 confirms the patent portfolio scores are spread just as unevenly in patent portfolio rankings as tennis professionals. But they in fact true power law curves?

The mathematicians among us will confirm that a true power law distribution will produce a straight line when plotted on a logarithmic curve. When Figure 2 is replotted in this way, we can see a ‘softening’ of the power law effect for all four distributions after about the 20th rank, Figure 3. This softening is much stronger though for tennis pros than for patent owners. We can speculate that the ATP (Association of Tennis Players) may try to manage the tour to ensure that some of the money is spread to lesser ranked players. Of course there is no such equivalent organisation for patent owners, which means it may harder to be a lowly ranked patent owner than a lowly ranked tennis player!