Patent Law

I looked at a sample of 100,000 patents that issued in 2006 and 2007 to see what proportion of them include at least one applicant filed information disclosure statement (IDS) in the electronic file wrapper found in PAIR. About 83% of these recently issued patents include an IDS. The graph below breaks-up results roughly according to Art Unit at the PTO and sorts results according to the percentage patents that include an IDS in the file wrapper.

Because most of these categories include well over 1000 patents, the difference between individual groups is statistically significant (.99 CI) whenever the actual difference between two groups is at least four percentage points.