A study of Patent Thickets (1.31Mb) - UK Intellectual Property Office

A Study of Patent Thickets 45
Cout of Triples
0 50 100 150 200 250
Count Of Triples in Chemistry
by Area and Priority Year
1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005
Priority Year
Organic Chem. Biotechn. Pharmaceuticals Polymers Food Chem.
Materials Chem. Metallurgy Surface Tech. Chem. Eng Env. Techn.
Count of triples in chemistry by technology area and priority year
These three figures largely confirm what Figure 2 already indicated. The increases in triples
counts are very high in almost all technology areas within the main area Electrical Engineering,
while they are significantly lower in almost all technology areas within the main areas Instruments
and Chemistry.
Some noteworthy detail emerges, however:
• In Electrical Engineering triple counts are particularly high in the areas of
Telecommunications, Audiovisual Technology, and Computer Technology.
• In Instruments there is a five-fold increase in the level of the triples count between 1995
and 2000 in Optics. We found that the initial growth in triples was driven mainly by
patenting of the following firms: Canon, Matsushita, Seiko, and Epson. Subsequently the
high level of triples is due to Sony, Ricoh and Samsung.
• In Chemistry we would not expect patent thickets to play a major role, with the possible
exception of Biotechnology where it has been repeatedly argued that they may exist.
Figure 5 indicates that if at all a patent thicket may be growing in the area of Organic
Chemistry where triples counts doubled between 2000 and 2005.
While these figures provide an indication of how dense patent thickets are in different technology
areas, they do not show the structure of thickets and the firms involved in it. Figure 6 below
shows the network of critical references, which contributed to one or more triples, in the
technology area Telecommunications in the year 2005. The nodes in this figure represent
individual firms. The size of the node represents the number of limiting citations to the firm’s prior