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Number of Utility Patent Claims Issued By USPTO Per Year Has Quintupled in 30 Years

By Troll Tracker

Dennis Crouch had an interesting post from December 23 on rising claim counts. Dennis provides a graph showing that the number of average total claims in a U.S. Patent rose from about 10 in 1976, to 15 in 1995, to nearly 20 in 2004.

Looking at 1976 through 2006, we can go here to find the number of utility patents issued per year, and multiply it by Dennis's number, to get roughly the following graph, of the number of patent claims issued per year, over a 30-year period (imagine that there are actually readable numbers along the x-axis representing years from 1976 to 2006 - it's amazing I was even able to figure out how to do this graph - can't figure out how to get the years on it so anyone can read them, but you get the picture).

Number of Utility Patent Claims Issued by USPTO per Year, 1976-2006

Year	Patents Issued	Claims/Patent	Claims Issued
1976	70,226	10.1	709,282
1977	65,269	10.2	665,744
1978	66,102	10.7	707,291
1979	48,854	11.7	571,572
1980	61,819	11.3	698,555
1981	65,771	12.4	815,560
1982	57,888	11.6	671,501
1983	56,860	11.7	665,262
1984	67,200	11.4	766,080
1985	71,661	11.0	788,271
1986	70,860	11.8	836,148
1987	82,952	11.9	987,129
1988	77,924	12.6	981,842
1989	95,537	13.2	1,261,088
1990	90,365	12.9	1,165,709
1991	96,511	12.5	1,206,388
1992	97,444	13.0	1,266,772
1993	98,342	14.8	1,455,462
1994	101,676	14.6	1,484,470
1995	101,419	16.1	1,632,846
1996	109,645	17.2	1,885,894
1997	111,984	17.1	1,914,926
1998	147,518	16.7	2,463,551
1999	153,485	17.9	2,747,381
2000	157,494	18.4	2,897,890
2001	166,036	18.9	3,138,080
2002	167,331	19.2	3,212,755
2003	169,023	19.6	3,312,851
2004	164,291	20.2	3,318,678
2005	143,806	19.5	2,804,217
2006	173,771	19.5	3,388,535

Note that the number of claims issued per year has almost quintupled in those 30 years, from under 700,000 claims per year to over 3 million for the last several years. That's amazing. And people wonder why the PTO is passing rules attempting to limit continuations and the number of claims per application.

Full post as published by Patent Troll Tracker on January 08, 2008 (boomark / email).