Do most US patent applications originate as US national phase entries of Patent Cooperation Treaty applications, or are they directly filed in the USPTO without regard to the PCT? The answer depends on whose applications we’re talking about. Let’s explore.
Click the Assignees & Attorneys tab to open a visualization of the USPTO’s 2012 patent grant data. Note the order of the countries listed in the Assignee Country section at the bottom. You should see US, JP, Null (unknown), KR, DE, TW, FR, CN in that order (i.e. ranked according to the number of patent documents per assignee country).
Note the Filing Type section of the visualization. Hover your mouse over it for an explanation of the PCT and non-PCT filing types. Click the PCT row to reconfigure the visualization with data pertaining only to US patents which issued in 2012 from applications that entered the US national phase via the PCT. The plant and design patent kind codes no longer appear—only the utility patent (and corresponding reissue) kind codes remain. That makes sense, since the PCT pertains only to utility patent applications.
Note the new ranking order in the Assignee Country section. You should see JP, US, DE, FR, Null (unknown), KR, GB, NL in that order. This tells us that, in the context of US patents which issued in 2012, Japanese assignees were the heaviest users of the PCT national entry mechanism, followed by Americans, Germans, Koreans, etc. "Null (unknown)" corresponds to patents for which no Attorney or Agent is indicated in the USPTO’s bibliographic data (this does not necessarily mean that the patents were not prosecuted by an IP firm).
In the Assignee section at the top of the visualization you’ll see some well known Japanese, Korean and German assignees.
Click a data bar in the Assignee Country section to reconfigure the visualization with data pertaining only to that country. Notice the relative percentages of PCT vs. non-PCT filings for that country, as indicated in the Filing Type section of the visualization. For example, over 60% of the US patents that issued to Norwegian assignees in 2012 were based on PCT national phase entries.
You can further reconfigure the visualization by clicking a data bar in the Assignee section, or in the Attorney or Agent section, or both, to restrict the visualization to a selected assignee, IP firm, or both.
Click the "Revert All" button (the circular back arrow) at the bottom of the visualization to go back to the initial visualization. Try any different reconfiguration you like in order to see the relative importance of the PCT (in the context of US patents issued in 2012) from the perspective of any selected country, assignee or IP firm, or combinations thereof.
