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Show HN: View the patent and innovation history of any company

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Re: Show HN: View the patent and innovation history of any company

#2
Microsoft seems to hold something over 100,000 worldwide (their main company and through their licensing company). Is there any logic in limiting the number of patents a company can hold? at what point do you simply have too many? is there such a thing as a monopoly from a purely intellectual property perspective?. Just thinking out loud.

Re: Show HN: View the patent and innovation history of any company

#4
Cool!

My first search ("bosch") turned up almost a quarter of a million in the main company. Waay more than e.g. Ericsson, Milwaukee, Ryobi, Microsoft and Google which I searched next.

Is there a "leaderboard" page?

Edit: found the top lists at the bottom, but I don't want to pick a category, and the list format shows list position but not patent count unless you click each entry, which to me was not very accessible.

Re: Show HN: View the patent and innovation history of any company

#5

Microsoft seems to hold something over 100,000 worldwide (their main company and through their licensing company). Is there any logic in limiting the number of patents a company can hold? at what point do you simply have too many? is there such a thing as a monopoly from a purely intellectual property perspective?. Just thinking out loud.

Some are defensive some are offensive. Someone like Qualcomm uses them to get a percentage of every device but also uses them to protect themselves against other companies, as they also sell chipsets. Also patents expire. So they may have one but after the time limit they are not really worth much anymore other than a defense. Would limiting the number they hold really help? Think one chipset they had to pull was over some what most people would consider the most tiny of features. Plus limiting would not really put a dent in many of these companies I am sure they would think of some way around it.

Re: Show HN: View the patent and innovation history of any company

#6
post #4

Cool! My first search ("bosch") turned up almost a quarter of a million in the main company. Waay more than e.g. Ericsson, Milwaukee, Ryobi, Microsoft and Google which I searched next. Is there a "leaderboard" page? Edit: found the top lists at the bottom, but I don't want to pick a category, and the list format shows list position but not patent count unless you click each entry, which to me was not very accessible.

Indeed, leaderboard per jurisdiction would be super interesting. IBM with 287000 patents would likely be in the top ones.

Re: Show HN: View the patent and innovation history of any company

#9
I got curious and went to consult Amazon's patents. Among several others, in the same line, I found this one in particular: WO2020264431A1 2020-06-26 Connection pooling for scalable network services. I visited the patent page: https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2020264431A1/en And essentially it's the (detailed) description of how a connection pool works. "Ipsis litteris" !!! Is it just me who thinks this kind of patent is simply nonsense? IMHO, the only purpose of this type of patent is to intimidate or trolling other companies with less money to spend on giant legal departments and non-sense patent disputes.

Re: Show HN: View the patent and innovation history of any company

#10
post #9

I got curious and went to consult Amazon's patents. Among several others, in the same line, I found this one in particular: WO2020264431A1 2020-06-26 Connection pooling for scalable network services. I visited the patent page: https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2020264431A1/en And essentially it's the (detailed) description of how a connection pool works. "Ipsis litteris" !!! Is it just me who thinks this kind of pa…

I'm not going to comment on the substance of the application, I have no idea.

I just wanted to point out that A1 at the end of this document means this is JUST a published application.

One would need to find each "GRANTED" application that claims priority to this application to find any patents. Then one would need to read the claims on each patent to really know what it covers.

The WO at the beginning means it was filed with WIPO first, which is not any particular country. WIPO is the World Intellectual Property Organization. This is an application process that makes it simpler to go to multiple countries, but every country has its own process (the EU countries have more synergy in the process and their own EP process).

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