Although intellectual property is an intangible asset, its value cannot be underestimated. Sometimes a small patent can reach billions or even billions of dollars. There are big names in the circle who have counted the most profitable patents in the world. Let's take a look at Bian Xiao!
Make a bold ranking according to the information found from open channels and the understanding of the industry.
1,10 billion dollars or more patents;
2. Patents exceeding one billion dollars;
3. Hundreds of millions of dollars in patents.
I saw that an answer mentioned the patent of Lipitor, and its estimated value has reached hundreds of billions of dollars, but this estimate is not the value of a single patent. From the analysis of patent scope, Pfizer has registered at least five patents for Lipitor:
Patent family analysis
In this way, a single patent can reach tens of billions of dollars. The most valuable patent is US468 1893, granted to 1987.
As an analogy, the patent of Viagra is also listed as one of the most profitable patents in history. Although it was originally developed to treat cardiovascular diseases, it is a magical accident to produce such great value now.
Before finding more profitable patent evidence, put it in the first place together with US468 1893, which is one of the patents with a threshold of10 billion dollars:
0 1/ pyrazolopyrimidinone anti-angina drug
Priority date:120 June 990;
Patent number: US5250534
Inventors: Andrew s bell, david brown, Nicholas k Terret.
As for the actual value of this patent, we found a professional data source (statistical portal) to verify that Pfizer's annual sales of Viagra will not exceed $2 billion, and it will not exceed $50 billion in 20 years.
Viagra income statistics
The actual value of patents should be tens of billions of dollars. Of course, the initial investment of companies like Pfizer is also huge (hundreds of millions of dollars).
On 20 1 1, the patent was allowed to be extended for 283 days. In my impression, the validity period of patents in the United States will be extended to 2020 (if the patent period under review is too long, meeting the conditions can be extended as compensation).
Extended authority
Sometimes it is difficult for you to tell whether a patent has made a company or a company has made a patent. This goes back to the question of which came first, the chicken or the egg.
For example, when people keep saying that Apple's Samsung patents are awesome, it is hard to assume that they are awesome without these patents. If you think the answer is yes, then the maintenance of these patents may only be because the giants can afford high legal fees, so that this patent that should not exist can continue to exist. If this is inferred, then some high-value patents are just the result of the cause.
Another important but often overlooked factor is that patent value often does not exist alone, but exists and manifests as a whole. A typical example is the communication field, such as the patent portfolio of Qualcomm, Ericsson, Huawei and ZTE. Teacher Wu Jun called this patent portfolio "the Great Wall of Patents", which is really vivid.
Based on the above factors, two criteria for selecting the most valuable patents are given, including:
(1) It is best for small and medium-sized companies (or individuals) to file patents at an early stage, instead of waiting until the company is big enough to blow people up like Ali (except for pharmaceutical companies, where the initial investment is too large, it will cost hundreds of millions);
(2) patents must be well-founded, otherwise countless latecomers in the market can casually avoid digging their own fields. In other words, the patent should give the owner a monopoly right.
Again: if a patent can't get a monopoly, let alone make money.
Based on these two criteria, I think the most valuable patents include:
02/ improve telegraph
Award:1876 March 3rd;
Patent number: us174465;
Inventors: Alexander Graham Bell, thomas watson.
Bell patent document
The famous Alexander Graham Bell (1March 3, 847-1August 2, 922) obtained the patent for the first available telephone in the world. From the open channel, this patent is still controversial. It is said that on March 3rd, 876 (Bell's 29th birthday), Bell's patent application was approved with the patent number of US 174465.
At the same time, a few hours after Bell applied for a telephone patent, another outstanding inventor Eliza Gray also applied for a patent for his telephone. Due to the difference of several hours, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that Bell was the inventor of the telephone (the matter reversed after 2000: the US Congress ruled that Italian antonio meucci was the inventor of the telephone on June 15, 2002).
Alexander Graham Bell
In any case, this patent provides a monopoly basis for the rise of Bell. Within a year, Bell Telephone Company was established because of its patent monopoly right, and the patented invention was also transformed into practical business.
This patent is hardly valued by today's standards, but it directly promoted the birth of a super monopoly enterprise. 1899, Bell Telephone Company was acquired by AT&T Company (later renamed AT&; T) acquisition, the company continues to be a real monopolist, monopolizing the long-distance and local telephone market in the United States for a long time. Later, no matter how it is split and reorganized, it can be seen in the world's top 500.
The value of this patent, personally, ranks it within the threshold of tens of billions of dollars, and ranks in the same echelon as the patent of Viagra.
A tens of billions of patents should also include this item:
03/ Secret communication system
Date of application:1941June10;
PatentNo.: US2292387
Inventor: Hedy Lamarr
Hedy Lamarr
Heidi Rama, known as the mother of CDMA, is talked about by many people as a movie star.
This invention is considered to have laid the foundation for today's mobile phones and wireless communication systems, and many later patents were directly or indirectly cited from it (from Google patents, the number of citations reached 1 12).
Creative viewpoint
Qualcomm popularized the CDMA technology involved in this patent in 1985, and built a patent wall around power control, co-frequency multiplexing, soft switching and other technologies, which can be said to be the biggest beneficiary of today's patent system: the annual patent licensing income reaches several billion dollars.
Qualcomm's profit growth
Next is a billion-dollar patent:
04/ Method of sorting nodes in linked database
Patent number: US 6285999,
Award: September 4, 2006, 5438+0,
Inventor: Lawrence Page
Larry Page
US6285999 is Google's famous PageRank patent. The basic idea of this patent is that through "link popularity", the information on the Internet can be catalogued or sorted in a hierarchical structure; The more links a page has, the more popular it is and the higher its ranking should be.
This patent and technology led to greater relevance or "accuracy" of search results (that is, with this patent, the implementation effect will be good, but it is unnecessary, for example, Baidu used other algorithms, what is the effect ...), and quickly convinced Yahoo, which was dominant at that time, to use the search results provided by Google. Later, Google was formally established, and this patent and its PageRank continued to provide an important foundation for all Google web search tools.
The owner of this patent is Stanford University, but it is exclusively licensed to Google. It is said that Stanford University received a license fee of 6.5438+0.8 million shares of Google, which was sold for $336 million in 2005.
Patent view
Then, with a more accurate license fee, it will become some basis for us to evaluate the actual value of this patent. Compared with 2005, Google's current market value has increased by 10 times (from more than 50 billion dollars in 2005 to nearly 700 billion dollars now).
Google market value
From this perspective, today's license fee for this patent can be close to $5 billion.
In addition, judging from the term of the patent (20 years), this patent is still valid, and it continues to shine for Google, an awesome company (when writing this answer, all search engines use Google, and my mother no longer has to worry that the search results are all advertisements ...).
05/ Blu-ray 404 patent
Shuji Nakamura
This patent is very famous in the industry, and the inventor Shuji Nakamura even won the Nobel Prize in Physics for 20 14 years for this patented technology.
1993, nakamura invented the double-stream MOCVD method, which enabled nikaya to mass-produce practical high-brightness blue light-emitting diodes, and achieved the global dominance of the LED lighting market, and earned hundreds of billions of yen in the following years (wiki data).
Later, Nakamura launched a series of lawsuits with Japanese color around patents and patent transfer.
On June 30, 65438, Nakamura formally sued Niyahua, demanding compensation for the invention consideration. Based on the judgment that "the contribution of Nakamura's invention is not less than half", the court of first instance ruled that the Japanization needs to pay 20 billion yen. However, the Tokyo High Court finally ruled on June 5438+1October 1 1 day, 2005 that "settlement was proposed" and Xinjiahua paid 840 million yen to Nakamura.
That is to say, Nakamura thinks the actual value of the patent is $200 million, but in the end he can only get a few million dollars (about $9 million, Shuji Nakamura and his lawyer criticized "the Japanese judicial system is terrible" at a press conference).
In any case, with the role of this patent in the LED industry, these millions of dollars are definitely not low-priced, and the actual value should be reasonably divided within the scope of hundreds of millions of dollars.
06/ Dyson patent
1986, Dyson obtained his first American patent (American patent. No.4,593,429, relating to vacuum cleaner technology).
Dyson set up his own manufacturing company Dyson Co., Ltd. instead of selling his inventions to major manufacturers. 1In June 1993, he opened a research center and factory in Malmesbury, Wiltshire.
So there are a series of products behind:
1999, Dyson sued Hoover (UK) for patent infringement. The High Court ruled that Hoover deliberately copied the basic components of his patented design within the scope of his triple scroll dust-free bag vacuum cleaner. Hoover agreed to pay 4 million pounds in compensation. The actual value of this patent is also in the range of hundreds of millions of dollars.
abstract
1, the really good patent is usually the earliest basic patent in the industry;
2. If the patent can't obtain the monopoly right, it is not a high-value patent;
Most people like open source, but how to balance the incentive effect of patent monopoly on inventors and the interests of the public is always a difficult point.