Patent transactions in the marketplace: Lessons from the USPTO Patent Assignment Dataset

• Author: Stuart J. H. Graham,Amanda F. Myers,Alan C. Marco
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/jems.12262
• Published date: 01 September 2018
• Date: 01 September 2018

Received: 28 June 2015 Revised: 11 April 2018 Accepted: 13 April 2018

DOI: 10.1111/jems.12262

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Patent transactions in the marketplace: Lessons from the USPTO

Patent Assignment Dataset

Stuart J. H. Graham1Alan C. Marco2Amanda F. Myers3

1Scheller College of Business, GeorgiaInsti-

tute of Technology,Atlanta, Georgia

2School of Public Policy,Georgia Institute of

Technology,Atlanta, Georgia

3United States Patent and TrademarkOffice,

Office of Chief Economist, Alexandria,

Virginia

Correspondence

Stuart J. H. Graham, SchellerCollege of Busi-

ness,800 W. Peachtree St. NW,Georgia Insti-

tuteof Technology, Atlanta, Georgia 30308,

USA.

Email:stuar t.graham@scheller.gatech.edu

Theviews expressed are those of the individual

authors and do notnecessar ilyreflect official

positionsof t he UnitedStates Patent and Trade-

markOffice or the Office of Chief Economist.

BothGraham and Marco were employees of

USPTOdur ing the writing of this manuscript.

Wethank Robert Kimble for data parsing and

coding;Kirsten Apple, Michael Carley, Paul

D'Agostino,and Steven Jackson for valuable

researchassistance; and Adrian Kovacs, Jamie

Kucab,Carlos Ser rano, Saurabh Vishnub-

hakat,and par ticipants at the USPTO-Searle

CenterWorkshop on New Innovation-research

Data Sources (April 9–10, 2015) foruseful

comments.

Abstract

Transaction records involving U.S. patent documents have been maintained by the

United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) for over 40 years, but have not

been extensively used by scholars.One explanation is that these dat a have not been in

a form amenable for research. To help remedy this deficiency and to foster schol-

arship, the USPTO Office of Chief Economist is curating internal agency records

to release a series of datasets in research-ready formats. This article describes the

USPTO PatentAssignment Dataset (UPAD), a relational database of roughly 6 million

assignments, licenses, securitizations, and other conveyances involving about 10 mil-

lion U.S. patents and patent applications, recorded 1970–2014. To promote research

uses, this article provides a comprehensive data description and presents stylized facts

derived from the records. Although this article discusses several limitations inherent

in using these data, the release of the UPAD creates opportunities to conduct original

research, particularly relating to intellectual property collateralization and the markets

for technology and innovation.

KEYWORDS

innovation, intellectual property, licensing, markets for technology,patents

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

O3,L1,L2,G2,G3

1INTRODUCTION

Numerous studies haverelied upon data from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (“USPTO” or “Office”) as a valuable

resource for analyzing technological innovation.Although patent-related metr ics have been used in published research since the

1950s (Schmookler, 1954, 1957), the linking of patented inventions to the organizations that own them has proved par ticularly

vexing for researchers (Thoma et al., 2010). Although researchers using U.S. patent data have commonly relied on the assignee

listed on the front page of the grant document (Griliches, 1990), an additional source of assignment information—USPTO

“recordings”—has been recently employed (Chesbrough, 2006; Serrano, 2010). Patent assignment documentation, recorded

(optionally) by interested parties reflecting transactions involving U.S. patent applications and grants, have been maintained by

USPTO for over 40 years but have not yet been extensively used by scholars.

Despite a marked increase in business and economics scholarship exploring the markets fortechnology (e.g., Arora, Fosfuri, &

Gambardella, 2001; Benassi & Di Minin, 2009; Ceccagnoli, Graham, Higgins, & Lee, 2010; Fischer & Henkel, 2012; Ziedonis,

2004), USPTO assignment records have been used only sparingly in prior research. One explanation is that the data have not

J Econ Manage Strat. 2018;27:343–371. © 2018 WileyPeriodicals, Inc. 343wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/jems

344 JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS & MANAGEMENTSTRATEGY

been in a format amenable for use by researchers. To help resolve this deficiency and foster research, the USPTO Office of

the Chief Economist is releasing, and providing annual updates to, both patent- and trademark-assignment datasets in formats

more convenient for comprehensivestatistical analysis.1This article describes the USPTO Patent Assignment Dataset (hereafter

“UPAD”or“Dataset”), an organized relational database of assignments and other transactions recorded at USPTO during 1970–

2014. The UPAD is available for public download at: www.uspto.gov/economics.

InformationintheDataset is derived from records filed with USPTO representing transactions that convey U.S. patents

or patent applications between parties. Legally, the “original applicant is presumed to be the owner of an application for an

original patent, and any patent that may issue therefrom, unless there is an assignment.”2A valid assignment (generally a legal

agreement) transfers all interests in a patent or application from an existing owner (an assignor) to a recipient (an assignee).3

The USPTO allows parties to record assignments in order to, as much as possible, maintain a complete history of claimed patent

ownership interests—but the Office also allows recording of other documents that affect legal title (e.g., name changes,mergers)

or ownership of patent assets (e.g., licenses, security interests, mortgages, liens).4Such recording serves to give third parties

notice of “equitable interests” or other information relevant to patent ownership.5

The Dataset contains detailed information on roughly 6 million patent-asset conveyances recorded at USPTO during 1970–

2014. Because a recording can affect more than one “property” (a patent or patent application), and a property may be transferred

multiple times, the UPAD comprises over 10 million recording-property pairs. The UPADalso includes identifying information

for assignor(s) and assignee(s), the dates on which the conveyance was executed and subsequently recorded at the USPTO,

identifying U.S. patent and application numbers, and conveyancetypes (e.g., assignment, merger, security agreement, or license).

Because these assignment data have not been widely used in scholarship, this article provides a comprehensive description of

the UPAD and explains institutional details to aid researchers.

To enrich this description, the article also highlights a number of stylized facts derived from the Dataset. We find that the

majority of conveyance records in the UPAD appear to be “employer assignments” made from employee inventors to the firms

that employ them, and that while the frequency of such employer assignments grew steadily from 1981–2005, the volume has

flattened, or possibly decreased, after 2005. Furthermore, by examining recorded conveyances that appear to be firm-to-firm

“reassignments,” we show that the annual number of properties conveyed,af ter growingfor much of the prior two decades, also

appears to be stabilizing, or even falling. Although the UPAD shows roughly 4–5% of patents-in-force were reassigned in each

year during 1998–2012, this share subsequently declined—although this decline is less acute for information-technology patents.

An open question is whether these recent are the product of lower growth in the number of transactions, a lower propensity for

parties to disclose (i.e., record), increasing delay by parties in recording, or some other change—such as parties substituting

among conveyance types. Our analysis of the Dataset also suggests that firm-to-firm reassignments of patent applications (pre-

grant) has become more common recently, and that collateralizing patents to secure debts has increased over time, both in

absolute (“flow”) terms and relative to the stock of patents still in force (those not expired, or abandoned).

Although USPTO continues to release patent assignment records to the public in hierarchically structured XML files, these

data require considerable effort (parsing and cleaning) to be useful for many research purposes. This burden presents a barrier

to many empirical scholars. In order to facilitate their wider use, we parsed the XML files and migrated the data to the UPAD

relational database, available in formats more compatible with statistical tools and accessible to the research community.

The XML data also pose difficulties because information is input voluntarily by the recording party, and then reported “as

is” by USPTO with minimal to no verification and standardization. To lower users’ costs, we have constructed two additional

derivative data files to facilitate research. One file identifies and classifies the often irregular nature of conveyance text field

into standard categories (conveyance types) based on keywordsearching. In another constructed file, we indicate and correct for

possible errors in the patent and application numbers (as input by the recording party). To further aid researchers, we discuss

possible complications that Dataset users may encounter, including duplicate (redundant) records, recording time lags, and

apparent broken chains in legal title (ownership) we have observed across different conveyance records, involving an identical

property over time.

Although parties to a patent conveyance face certain legal incentives to record the transaction at the USPTO, recording is not

mandatory. As a result, how accurately transactions recorded at USPTO represent the population of patent-related transactions

remains an open question. Although this article briefly explores these motivations, we encourage researchers to continue to

examine the accuracy and coverage oft he UPAD, and consider how coveragemay vary over time, across technologies, by nature

of conveyance, and by type of assignor or assignee.

Despite these limitations, release of the UPAD opens multiple avenuesfor conducting original research. A particular advantage

in using patent assignment information is that these observations are dynamic and may be observed over the patent “life cycle”

(the patent term) unlike the static ownership information listed on the front page of a granted patent (what the research community

typically calls the “patent assignee”). Moreover, the Database provides information on the identities of the trading parties,