Who owns this patent?

Following other previous posts, I return on the issue of ownership changes in Patstat.

The goal is to understand what applicant is available, given a change of ownership. I'll refer from here onward only to EPO patents.
We may find such applications when looking into inpadoc legal data (TLS221 prs_code="RAP1" or prs_code="RAP2") .

I'll make also use of table tls227_pers_publn cause I expect we may have changes in persons in different publication stages due to ownership change.

For the example I'll use appln_id 216544 that is patent EP1197791

I run SQL:
Select
  t11.APPLN_ID,     t11.PUBLN_NR,   t11.PUBLN_KIND,
  t11.PUBLN_date,    t27.applt_seq_nr,   t06.PERSON_ID,
  t06.PERSON_NAME,   t06.PERSON_ADDRESS,   t06.PERSON_CTRY_CODE
From
  patstat.tls227_pers_publn t27 Inner Join
  patstat.tls206_person t06 On t27.person_id = t06.PERSON_ID Inner Join
  patstat.tls211_pat_publn t11 On t11.PAT_PUBLN_ID = t27.pat_publn_id
Where
  t11.APPLN_ID = 216544      And
  t27.applt_seq_nr > 0;

APPLN_ID	PUBLN_NR	PUBLN KIND	PUBLN_date	Applt seq_nr	PERSON ID	PERSON_NAME	PERSON ADDRESS	PERSON CTRY_CODE
216544	'1197791'	'A2'	'2002-04-17'	1	152352	'Sony International (Europe) GmbH'	'Kemperplatz 1,  10785 Berlin'	'DE'
216544	'1197791'	'A2'	'2002-04-17'	2	330065	'University Of Durham'	'South Road, Durham DH1 3LE'	'GB'
216544	'1197791'	'A3'	'2002-12-04'	1	152352	'Sony International (Europe) GmbH'	'Kemperplatz 1, 10785 Berlin'	'DE'
216544	'1197791'	'A3'	'2002-12-04'	2	330065	'University Of  Durham'	'South Road, Durham DH1 3LE'	'GB'

Thus we could evict there is no change of ownership.
On the other hand we may also check the registry where we find different informations:

Applicant(s)	For all designated states Sony Deutschland GmbH Kemperplatz 1 10785 Berlin / DE
	[2007/24]
Former [2005/40]	For all designated states Sony Deutschland GmbH Hugo-Eckener-Strasse 20 50829 Köln / DE
Former [2003/05]	For all designated states Sony International (Europe) GmbH Kemperplatz 1 10785 Berlin / DE
Former [2002/16]	For all designated states Sony International (Europe) GmbH Kemperplatz 1 10785 Berlin / DE
	For all designated states University Of Durham South Road Durham DH1 3LE / GB

So we obtain that the last owner is Sony Germany alone and not Sony international with Univ Durham.
This allows us to deduct that the registry could be the most reliable source both for last owner and for ownership change.

Refilling patent inventors country in patstat

When trying to make statistics by country of inventor, using Patstat, we always have to face the issue of missing data I already highlighted in some previous posts (for example here http://rawpatentdata.blogspot.it/2013/05/about-persons-country-code-in-patstat.html)


de Rassenfosse, G., Dernis, H., Guellec, D., Picci, L. & van Pottelsberghe de la Potterie, B., 2013. "The worldwide count of priority patents: A new indicator of inventive activity". Research Policy 42(3), 720-737.

The indicator proposed in this paper  counts priority patent applications filed by inventors from

a given country regardless of the patent office of application eliminating the geographic bias (but at the

introducing an institutional bias)

This methodology thus needs to get rid of the wide gaps in Patstat country assignation in table TLS206.

 

REFILLING of ctry codes:

The algorithm first selects all the priority filings of a given patent office in a given year. Then, for each filing that has missing information on the inventor’s country of residence, the algorithm looks into

six potential sources of information

• Source 1:  the priority document itself, when the information is available.

• Source 2: Retrieves information on inventors from the earliest direct equivalent in which the information is available.

• Source 3: If no information is available in the direct equivalents, the other second filings of the same family are browsed.

• Source 4: the country of residence of the applicant, as indicated in the priority document,

is used to proxy the country of the inventor.

• Source 5: If the country of the applicant is missing, it is searched for in the direct equivalents.

• Source 6: If no information on the applicant’s country was found, it is tracked in all the other second filings of the same family.

• Source 7: Finally, if the information is still missing, the country of the priority office is used for the country of residence of the inventor.

Mysql code and explanation can be downloaded from:

http://gder.phpnet.org/rassenfosse/paper_The_worldwide_count_of_priority_patents.html