Patent Value Indicator

The inventive subject matter of patents issued by the US patent office (as well as by the European and Japanese patent offices) are defined by claims which legally define the subject matter that the inventor or inventors want to be legally protected. Usually you can determine some measure of the value of the patent claims by observing the amount of words used to define the claimed invention. For example a claimed invention which necessitates 100 words to be legally patentable (i.e. novel and nonobvious) over the prior art technology is likely to be less valuable than a claimed invention which only requires 20 words to be legally patentable. Also if a first claim uses words which are more technologically complex then a second claim of a similar length then the first claim is likely to be less valuable than the second claim (because a technologically complex word is generally representative of a long series of less complex words)

What I propose is to automatically scan in the claims of all newly issued patents and create a ranking system which rates newly patented inventions by a value scale determined in part by the amount and the complexity of words used to define the claim. A score may be provided for each word or phrase in the claim in accordance with a predefined dictonary of technological complexity (i.e.transistor=3, differential amplifier=5, miller integrator=7). All non-tech words would be given a score of 1. Performing a sum of all the scores would provide a value which is inversely related to the value of that patent (the smaller the value the more likely the value of the patent). Of course different technologies would require different dictonaries of word scores in accordance with the typical syntax and complexity level of the technology.

Every week the US patent office issues thousands of new patents. Using such a system as proposed might provide a rough indication of which patents (and which corporations that owns the patents) are most valuable and provide an indicator of future stock value of the associated corporations.