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The major patent offices produce some of the world’s most valuable technological data, with an entire industry having emerged around analysing their output for the benefit of corporate strategists and legal practitioners.

In terms of volume of information, the CNIPA and the USPTO are by far the most prolific.

The latter has long been the central arena for quantitative patent analysis, thanks to its decades-long track record as the pre-eminent patent forum. In the first analysis in this section, office action specialist IP Toolworks, teams up with data provider GreyB to take a deep dive into USPTO patent rejection trends over the last 10 years, a period that has seen the Alice decision and other developments transform the examination dynamic.

While China’s patent office has witnessed an explosion in activity over the last decade or so, language and technical issues often prevent outside groups from adequately studying its activity. As just one example of this, the CNIPA has never publicly announced aggregate statistics on the results of its all-important patent validity trials. So in 2020, IAM teamed up with IncoPat to dig into the numbers, looking at the past 10 years of decisions. In this special report, we revisit the Patent Re-examination and Invalidation Department and gain further meaningful insights into the most contentious aspect of CNIPA practice.

Finally, we turn to the corporate world to see how major patent owners reacted to the uncertain business environment of 2020 when it came time to make key US patent renewal decisions. IAM’s Bridget Diakun examined the numbers to show which companies made the deepest cuts as the pandemic hit. It remains to be seen whether these decisions represent one-off crisis measures or a paradigm shift in how portfolios are managed.

Source: https://www.iam-media.com/report/special-reports/q4-2021/article/patent-office-data-intelligence