Patent Assertion Entity Activity

Table 5.1: Percentage of Acquired Patents with Acquisition
Recorded in USPTO Reassignment Data
All Acquired
Patents
Portfolio Acquired
Patents only
Litigation Acquired
Patents only
Assignee Name
matches
Assignee Name
matches and PTO
record date within
one year of
Acquisition Date
Assignee Name
matches and PTO
record date within
90 days of
Acquisition Date
95.5% 78.5% 66.9%
97.6% 79.1% 71.6%
80.6% 74.3% 33.4%
Note: Percentages in each cell are of the full set of patents (excluding applications) which were directly
acquired (not exclusively licensed) in the study period. The percentages indicate the fraction of patents in
each row that meet the criteria specified in the column titles.
The FTC employed a basic word-matching algorithm that used patent numbers and acquiring entity
names to identify USPTO assignment records corresponding to the study data. 344 For reasons
detailed in the methodology appendix, not all patents reported in the patent holdings and acquisition
sections were included in this analysis. 345 Patents not included fell into three categories: patents acquired
outside of the study period, patent applications, and patents acquired via exclusive license. Of the
approximately 20,000 patents included in the analysis, 95.5% matched the assignee name reported by
the Responding PAE to an assignee (acquirer) name recorded for that patent at the USPTO. 346 The FTC
also measured how quickly the patent acquisitions were reported to the USPTO. 347 For those
344
A patent number match alone was not sufficient to establish reporting by the Study PAE acquirers, as patents can be
reassigned a number of times. Accordingly, to calculate Study PAE reporting rates, the algorithm attempted to match the
name of the entity acquiring a patent reported by the Study PAE to the assignee of the patent in the USPTO data. A match
was recorded as taking place if one of the assignee name fields in the USPTO data matched the acquirer name in the study
data submitted to the FTC by Responding PAEs.
345
See Appendix B: Methodology.
346
All of the patents (approximately 5% of the total sample) with no match were manually checked to verify that there was
no record of the PAE acquisition name in the USPTO data for that patent. Possible reasons for patents acquired by Study
PAEs not being reported as assigned in the USPTO data include: failure of Study PAEs to notify the USPTO of the patent
transfer, notification to the USPTO after the January 2015 cutoff date for inclusion in the USPTO data, and misreporting of
the assignee names by Responding PAEs in the study data.
347
To determine the time duration between the transaction and USPTO notification, the FTC compared USPTO record dates
for those transfers with successfully matched assignee names to the transaction dates reported by the Responding PAEs.
145