Can Someone Patent Better Patent Database Queries?
While we take issue with the idea that people who patent a lot are innovative, it is still interesting to find out about who is doing all this patenting these days. Every year or so some stats get published about what companies are patenting the most things, but apparently getting some of the other stats out of the database is a bit trickier. Slashdot points out that USA Today’s Kevin Maney decided he’d like to go interview the top living patent holders in the US… only to find out that the USPTO has no clue and can’t come up with an easy way to figure it out. The database query just isn’t that easy, and the one guy the office has to do stuff like that has been busy on other projects. Maney took some guesses, based on the last time that info was released (1997), and points out that the US citizen who might have the most US patents (others outside the US have more), has many patents for things like “Method of covering a flower pot.” Perhaps that proves the point we were making in the f
