Congratulations to Cynthia Flanagan, a patent agent at Syracuse’s Burr & Brown firm! As an entry for last week's contest, Cynthia submitted U.S. Patent No. 6,477,533, “Systems and methods of maintaining client relationships”, assigned to Travel Services International, Inc. Apparently forty-one people contributed to the conception of these methods of assigning travel agents to cruise customers.
More impressive than this patent's large number of contributors, however, was Cynthia’s
methodology for finding it. Since the
PTO search engine is a bit primitive, Cynthia got creative. She noted that a large percentage of
inventors are listed with middle initials, and that those middle initials are
searchable as distinct words within the “Inventor” field. Try searching “in/z” today and you’ll get
4,177 patents with inventors "___ Z. ___".
So, if you are looking for a patent with lots of inventors, try a lot of middle initials, say in/(a and b and c and d). That gives a fair number of candidates to then look at manually. It's not scientific -- you need to include the right combo of initials, and there may be a patent out there with a hundred inventors who don't have middle names -- but it's a great heuristic approach.
Using Cynthia’s technique, I was able to find fairly quickly
a pair of patents with even more inventors. 51 to be exact. And these patents belong to Microsoft for its .NET platform application program interface. They are U.S. Patent Nos. 7,013,469 and
7,017,162. Can you imagine the inventor disclosure
meetings? And if these ever are
litigated, whose deposition is taken? Wow.
But since I’m not eligible for the contest, a gift certificate for Baskin-Robbins is on its way out to Cynthia. Thanks to everyone who entered!
Recent Comments