CLAIMS Direct 2.0 - Detailed Examples of Value Added Content

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IFI CLAIMS has recently released CLAIMS Direct 2.0 - a major upgrade to its pioneering patent web service.  CLAIMS Direct 2.0 combines IFI's global patent database and RESTful API delivery system with its value added US patent database.  IFI's value added content includes:
  • Assignee Name Standardization
  • Assignment of Probable Assignee Names to US pre-grant publication that do not include assignee information.
  • A legal status indicator that summarizes the current status of granted patents.
  • Estimated patent expiration dates that consider term extensions.
  • Editorial improvements to US chemical patent titles from 1950-2011.
  • IFI chemical index data for US chemical patents from 1950-2011. 
The assignee names and legal status will be of interest to anyone who uses patent data for competitive intelligence and technology monitoring.  Here are some detailed examples that illustrate what the data provides.  Note, CLAIMS Direct 2.0 provides XML formatted data through a developer friendly web service.  The examples below show the XML tags and sample data. 

Standardized Assignee Names


IFI’s Standardized Assignee Names will be very valuable to anyone who struggles with assignee name based searching, reporting and analysis. IFI CLAIMS actively maintains a database of standardized assignee names and a mapping of name variants and common misspellings. IFI CLAIMS uses the standardized names to produce its annual US Top 50 Patent Assignee reports. Here are two examples. Figure 1 shows US-6981227-B1. Note that the patent is assigned to “Mircrosoft Corporation”. The IFI value added "ifi-standardized-name" tag provides a much more accurate name. It is interesting to note that the USPTO assigns 15 patents and applications to "Mircrosoft" and 30 to "Mircosoft". If you are tracking Microsoft, are you missing these patents?


Microsoft Example 

Figure 2 shows a second example. US-6980736-B1 was originally assigned to MCI. IFI updates this to Verizon, based on reassignment information.
MCI Example  


Probable Assignee Names


Many published US pre-grant publications (applications) appear without assignee names. Obviously, this makes searching and analysis very difficult. For these documents, IFI CLAIMS computes a probable assignee name based on inventor names and other data. Here are two examples. Figure 3 shows US-20100332543-A1. Note that there is no listed assignee. IFI CLAIMS provides the "ifi-standardized-name-probable" field. In this case, AOL.
AOL Example 

Figure 4 shows a second example. In this case the probable assignee is General Electric.
GE Example 

Legal Status


IFI CLAIMS provides very useful legal status information. This includes:
  • "anticipated-expiration" - The estimated expiration data based simply on the filing date and standard rules.
  • "adjusted-expiration" - The estimated expiration date - including the term extension (if applicable.
  • "ifi-term-extension" - Number of days term extended by USPTO and the FDA (PTA + PTE).
  • "ifi-patent-status-description" - A simple summary of the patent's estimated status. Based on USPTO sources, the possible values for granted patents are Active, Expired - Life Time, Expired - Fee Related, Active - Reinstated, Withdrawn. For published applications, the values are Pending, Withdrawn, Abandoned, Granted.
This data provides a quick and easy way of filtering out patents that are no longer in force. IFI recommends that for important legal matters, the patents file history should be reviewed for additional term adjustments. Figure 5 shows the values of these fields for US-8616915-B2.

Legal Status Example 

For more information, please contact us at CONTACT US.