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rights to the company, the assignment is usually recorded in the Patent Office while the application for patent is pending, and the patent in such cases is issued to the company. Similarly, if a company acquires ownership from someone outside the company before the patent is issued, the assignment is ordinarily recorded in the Patent Office and the patent issued to the company. The patents issued to a company hence are the sum of the patents resulting from the research activities of the company itself and the patents resulting from inventions purchased from others before the patent is issued. The instances in which an assignment is made but is not recorded. and hence the patent is not issued to the company, are not believed to be significant in number.

A company may also acquire a patent after it has been issued to some individual and the assignment in such cases may also be recorded in the Patent Office. The indexes which have been mentioned do not include such transfers and the data presented here do not include patents owned by a company which were acquired after they were issued. A study made in 1938 showed that, of the patents issued from January 1, 1931 to June 30, 1938, the number acquired by corporations from individuals after issuance was 2.84 percent of the total issued (of this amount 0.33 percent was by a selected group of 157 large corporations, 2.22 percent by other United States corporations and 0.29 percent by foreign corporations). This gives some indication of the proportion of such subsequently acquired patents and there is no reason to suppose that the number would be significantly different today.

A company may also acquire patents from another company to which they were issued in the first place. Such acquisitions would not change the total number of patents issued to corporations but might change the distribution as between types or classes of corporations. Such transfers have not been investigated but a good many of them have been taken into account as will appear.

The total number of unexpired patents owned by a particular corporation consists of the number of unexpired patents initially issued to that corporation plus the number of unexpired patents acquired by the corporation after they were issued to someone else, less the number of patents it may have transferred to others. This number can be ascertained from the assignment records of the Patent Office, but the time and personnel which would be required to make title searches for the large numbers of patents involved were not available for the present study, and the cost would be very great.

As has been pointed out, the present study is substantially limited to ownership by corporations at the time the patent is issued, but the degree in which the data approximate total ownership has been indicated to some extent.

1955

3. NUMBER OF PATENTS IN FORCE DECEMBER 31, Since the term of a patent is 17 years, the number of unexpired patents at a given date would normally be the number of patents issued during the preceding 17 years. The total number of patents

1 Investigation of concentration of economic power: Hearings before the Temporary National Economie Committee. 76th Cong., pt. 3, Patents. (January 1939), exhibit 188, p. 1127. These hearings will be referred to as TNEC hearings, pt. 3, and some description of the study is given in section 6 of this report. In calentations leading to some of the data presented in 1938, it was estimated that the number of patents acquired by corporations from individuals after issuance was 4 percent of the total issued during the preceding 17 years and that of this amount one-half percent was by the selected group of 157 large corporations, 3 percent by other United States corporations and one-half percent by foreign corporations.

DISTRIBUTION OF PATENTS ISSUED TO

CORPORATIONS (1939–55)

1. OBJECT OF REPORT

The main object of this report is to present data with respect to the number and distribution of patents, unexpired on December 31, 1955, which were issued to corporations. Discussion is limited to description of the data and the manner in which the figures were obtained. The data presented relate primarily to the two questions which were asked, namely:

(1) Which companies have taken out the largest numbers of unexpired patents?

(2) How many unexpired patents have been issued to a selected group of the largest corporations?

These two questions are not identical since some companies to which a large number of patents have been issued might not be in the large corporation group, and some companies in the large corporation group might have very few patents. The phrase "issued to corporations" is synonymous with "taken out by corporations" but, as will appear, is not exactly equivalent to "owned by corporations." In addition to the above, some figures are presented on the total number of patents issued annually to corporations over a period of 20 years. Reissues, design patents, and plant patents are omitted from this study. Reissues, which averaged 185 a year during the period involved, are revisions of previously issued patents and their inclusion would amount to counting some patents twice. Design patents are omitted because they relate solely to the ornamental appearance of articles; they averaged 3,749 a year during the period involved. Plant patents are issued for new varieties of plants; these averaged 67 a year. The "regular" patents considered averaged 34,494 per year during the years 1939-55.

2. ISSUANCE AND OWNERSHIP OF PATENTS

While the application for a patent must be made and sworn to by the inventor (with some exceptions not important here), the patent itself may be issued to another party. If the applicant has assigned his rights, and the assignment is recorded in the Patent Office in time, the patent will be issued to the assignee. The printed copies of the specification and drawings of the patent carry the name of the assignee as the owner, as do the notices in the weekly Official Gazette of the United States Patent Office. These names also appear in a printed annual Index of Patentees, and a cumulative index of patentees in card form has been maintained in the Patent Office since 1931. The figures presented here with respect to separate companies have been gathered from this cumulative index and are hence in general limited to ownership at the time the patent is issued.

A company can own a patent by assignment from the inventor, or by assignment from someone else whose rights were in turn derived from the inventor. If an invention is made by an employee of a company under conditions which obligate the employee to assign all

rights to the company, the assignment is usually recorded in the Patent Office while the application for patent is pending, and the patent in such cases is issued to the company. Similarly, if a company acquires ownership from someone outside the company before the patent is issued, the assignment is ordinarily recorded in the Patent Office and the patent issued to the company. The patents issued to a company hence are the sum of the patents resulting from the research activities of the company itself and the patents resulting from inventions purchased from others before the patent is issued. The instances in which an assignment is made but is not recorded, and hence the patent is not issued to the company, are not believed to be significant in number.

A company may also acquire a patent after it has been issued to some individual and the assignment in such cases may also be recorded in the Patent Office. The indexes which have been mentioned do not include such transfers and the data presented here do not include patents owned by a company which were acquired after they were issued. A study made in 1938 showed that, of the patents issued from January 1, 1931 to June 30, 1938, the number acquired by corporations from individuals after issuance was 2.84 percent of the total issued (of this amount 0.33 percent was by a selected group of 157 large corporations, 2.22 percent by other United States corporations and 0.29 percent by foreign corporations). This gives some indication of the proportion of such subsequently acquired patents and there is no reason to suppose that the number would be significantly different today.

A company may also acquire patents from another company to which they were issued in the first place. Such acquisitions would not change the total number of patents issued to corporations but might change the distribution as between types or classes of corporations. Such transfers have not been investigated but a good many of them have been taken into account as will appear.

The total number of unexpired patents owned by a particular corporation consists of the number of unexpired patents initially issued to that corporation plus the number of unexpired patents acquired by the corporation after they were issued to someone else, less the number of patents it may have transferred to others. This number can be ascertained from the assignment records of the Patent Office, but the time and personnel which would be required to make title searches for the large numbers of patents involved were not available for the present study, and the cost would be very great.

As has been pointed out, the present study is substantially limited to ownership by corporations at the time the patent is issued, but the degree in which the data approximate total ownership has been indicated to some extent.

3. NUMBER OF PATENTS IN FORCE DECEMBER 31, 1955

Since the term of a patent is 17 years, the number of unexpired patents at a given date would normally be the number of patents issued during the preceding 17 years. The total number of patents

1 Investigation of concentration of economic power: Hearings before the Temporary National Economie Committee, 76th Cong., pt. 3, Patents, (January 1939), exhibit 188, p. 1127. These hearings will be referred to as TNEC hearings, pt. 3, and some description of the study is given in section 6 of this report. In calculations leading to some of the data presented in 1938, it was estimated that the number of patents acquired by corporations from individuals after issuance was 4 percent of the total issued during the preceding 17 years and that of this amount one-half percent was by the selected group of 157 large corporations, 3 percent by other United States corporations and one-half percent by foreign corporations.

issued in the 17 years from January 1, 1939, to December 31, 1955 (excluding reissues and design and plant patents), is 586,391.2 A few patents, which were issued prior to January 1, 1939, 59 in number, were extended under the law relating to extensions of patents of World War II veterans (64 Stat. 316, 66 Stat. 321); a few of these are still unexpired, but they are ignored in the total given. Also, a few patents may have been disclaimed or dedicated by their owners and hence technically would not be in force; no allowance has been made. for these. The number of patents issued during the preceding 17 years is taken as the number of unexpired patents or patents in force on December 31, 1955. This total number of patents is divided as shown in table 1.

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The figures in lines 1 to 4 of this table are estimates but they have been carried to the last digit and the percentages to two decimal places in order to make the totals balance. The manner in which these estimates were obtained is described in section 7, which also gives the same data divided on an annual basis. The patents indicated in line 4 of the table as issued to individuals include a small proportion (about 4.5 percent of the total) in which the applicant had assigned in whole or in part to some other individual.

Line 5 of the table gives the number of patents issued to the United States Government resulting from inventions made by Government employees or from research paid for by the Government. The number given in this line does not include patents resulting from applications seized from the enemy during the war, nor a small number issued to the Reconstruction Finance Corporation which held some patents and patent applications in connection with mortgages.

Line 6 of the table gives the number of patents issued directly to the Alien Property Custodian, or his successor the Attorney General, resulting from seized enemy and other alien-owned applications. During the period of the program of vesting enemy property, over 41,000 patents and 4,700 patent applications were vested. Most of the seized patents have since expired but on December 31, 1955, the Office of Alien Property still held 10,647 unexpired patents. Except when issued directly to the Custodian or his successor, these patents would appear in the tabulations in this report as attributed to the original foreign grantees.

If the number of the first patent issued in 1939 (2,142,080) is subtracted from the number of the first patent issued in 1956 (2.728,913) the result would be slightly higher than the total given here. This is due to the fact that some patent numbers were not used; an application might be in process of issue with the patent num ber assigned and then be withdrawn for some reason and the patent not issued (or issued later with another number), in such event the assigned patent number could not be used for some other case. These withdrawals averaged 26 per year during the period involved here.

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4. CORPORATIONS WITH THE LARGEST NUMBERS OF PATENTS, 1939-55

Limitations of time and personnel did not permit the counting of the number of patents issued to all corporations having any patents and an attempt was made to obtain only the names of all corporations with over 100 unexpired patents, and the number of patents issued to each of them.

The number of corporations to each of which more than 100 patents (including to a substantial extent the patents issued to wholly owned subsidiaries and merged companies) were issued during the 17 years 1939 to 1955 was found to be 394.3 The names of these companies arranged in the order of the number of patents issued to them, and also indicating the subsidiaries and merged companies which are included, are given in the appendix, list I. The present section will only give some totals and distributions.

Several tables are presented showing the distribution of the number of companies and of patents by ranges of patents. Table 2a is a short table showing the number of companies with more than 1,000 patents, the number of companies with 101 to 1,000 patents, and the total number of patents issued to the companies in these groups.

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The names of these companies were not, of course, known in advance. The manner in which they were obtained and how the work was done was as follows: A list (on cards) of companies was made up on which it was fairly certain that all or practically all companies with more than 100 patents would be included. This list was made by taking the name of each company which had 5 or more entries in the printed annual Index of Patentees in either of the years 1953, 1954, or 1955; by taking the name of each company on a discontinued card index of companies with their patents kept from the middle of 1938 to the middle of 1946 (and now otherwise uesless) which had more than 36 entries for this 8-year period; and by adding names not already included found on 4 lists of selected corporations which are described in footnote 5. The companies so listed were checked as indicated below for changes in names and mergers and additional names thus obtained. The result was a list of about 2,800 names.

The number of patents issued in the years 1939 to 1955, inclusive, to each of these companies was counted from the cumulative index of patentees, which has been referred to in section 2. This index was started in 1931 and additions made from week to week as patents are issued. Each patent is indexed by the name of the inventor and also by the name of the patentee, if other than the inventor, on 3 by 5 slips which are arranged in alphabetical order in 15 filing cabinets with a total of over 800 drawers. It is located in the public search room of the Patent Office and is in constant use by the public.

After the count was made, different names for the same company joined together, companies which had been merged during the period of the count also joined together, and patents issued to subsidiaries added, there resulted a total of 394 names to each of which more than 100 patents had been issued as assignee during the period 1939-55. It cannot, of course, be asserted categorically that the list is absolutely com plete, but it is believed to be practically complete and that the omissions, if any, would occur among the companies with the lower number of patents. One or two of the names may not actually be corporations, but have nevertheless been included.

Changes in names, mergers, and subsidiaries were ascertained as follows. The Assignment Branch of the Patent Office has kept a separate card index of changes in names and of mergers of companies, which have come to its attention through the recording of assignments of batches of patents and other papers. The name of each company on the first list which was made up was checked in this index. When it was found that there had been a change of name, the patents issued in each name were counted from the cumulative index of patentees and the results added together under the latest name. When it was found that a company on the list had been merged with others, the patents issued to each company so merged, and to the new company, were counted from the cumulative index and the results added together under the latest name. This consolidation of such names in large part would account for transfers of patents from one company to another.

There resulted from the count not only the names of the companies with over 100 patents, but also a large number of names of companies with fewer patents (there were nearly 400 names with from 50 to 100 patents), since the initial list was made considerably larger than might actually be necessary. The names of practically all of the companies with over 100 patents, of most of the companies with 50 to 100 patents, and of many of the companies with less than 50 patents, were looked up in Moody's Industrial Index, 1955, to determine the assets of the company and also to determine if it was a subsidiary of or had been acquired by some other company. If a company was found to be a wholly owned subsidiary of or acquired by another company, the patents issued to it were added to the patents issued to the parent company. Also, the names of many companies known to be subsidiaries of others had been included in

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