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DISTRIBUTION OF PATENTS ISSUED TO CORPORATIONS

5. PATENTS ISSUED TO SELECTED GROUPS OF CORPORATIONS, 1939-55

The patents issued to corporations are in this section divided among three groups of corporations: a selected group of 176 largest United States corporations, the other United States corporations, and foreign Corporations. The total patents issued in these three groups are shown by the following table.

TABLE 3.-Patents issued to groups of corporations, 1939-55

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The distribution of the patents in these three groups according to ranges of numbers of patents is given in the following table, which is similar to tables 2b and 2c except that the corporations are divided into three groups.

TABLE 4.-Distribution of patents to groups of corporations, 1939-55

Range

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The group of 176 largest United States corporations of the above 2 tables was selected by taking the top 150 industrial corporations, arranged by assets, and adding other companies in the same asset range which had any patents, and includes all the companies with assets of over $150 million which received any patents, with the possible omission of a few nonindustrial companies having only a very

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few patents. The names of these companies are included in the lists of companies in the appendix."

The patents issued to individual corporations were counted for the entire 17 years, and no division by years was made (except for a few companies as indicated in sec. 8). However, in view of the fact that the cumulative index used for the count is in 2 parts, the first part closing with 1951 and the second part beginning with 1952, it was possible to obtain readily a total for the 4 years 1952-55. The patents issued to the group of 176 large corporations were also separately counted for the single year 1955 from the printed annual Index of Patentees for this year. From these figures it was determined that the number of patents issued to the selected group of 176 large corporations during the 13 years 1939-51 was 21.08 percent of the total issued during these years; the number issued to this group during the 3 years 1952-54 was 20.68 percent of the total issued during these years; and the number issued in 1955 was 19.18 percent of the patents issued in this year.

6. DATA COMPILED IN 1938

Several references have been made to data compiled in 1938, and the subcommittee also referred to that study in its report of January 30, 1956 (S. Rept. No. 1464, 84th Cong., 2d sess., p. 2). In 1938 some data relating to patents issued to corporations were compiled for the Temporary National Economic Committee and printed in the

The group of largest corporations was obtained by utilizing several lists. The latest published list of corporations, arranged by size, at the time the work was done, was a list of the 500 largest industrial cor porations published as a supplement to Fortune magazine for July 1955. The Fortune Directory of the 500 Largest United States Industrial Corporations, 12 pages. This list excludes utilities and financial, transportation, trade, construction, and service companies. It was selected on the basis of net sales and not on the basis of assets, although the assets for each corporation listed (with a few exceptions) are given. The asset figures were obtained from Moody Industrial Index (1955) which gives the data as of the end of 1954. The company on this list with the lowest amount of assets has $12 million. When arranged according to assets, the list would not be complete since the companies included were not selected on this basis. The Fortune list furthermore contains some significant omissions, a few large companies having been omitted because of absence of sales data.

Another recent list of corporations arranged by size is a mimeographed list of the 200 largest corporations in the United States, excluding financial corporations, prepared by the Department of Commerce (U. S. Department of Commerce, 200 Largest Nonfinancial Corporations (1952), Business Structures Division, Office of Business Economics, 5 pages mimeographed). This list supplements the Fortune list by its inclusion of nonindustrial corporations; all the companies included have assets of over $200 million. A less recent list of corporations is a publication of the Federal Trade Commission, dated June 1951, entitled "A List of 1,000 Large Manufacturing Companies, Their Subsidiaries and Affiliates, 1948." These corporations were selected on the basis of assets, the data being taken from Moody's Industrial Index (1949). The names of all the corporations included in the above-mentioned three lists, as well as the names on an Industrial list published in 1938 (see footnote 6), which were not already on it, were added to the list of companies compiled as mentioned in footnote 3, and the number of patents counted for each of them in the manner which has been described. The assets of the companies on the 1938 list and also of the top group of the companies on the Federal Trade Commission list were also brought up to date from Moody Industrial Index (1955). In addition to this, the names of other companies having substantial numbers of patents which were obtained as described in footnote 3, supra, were checked in Moody's Index for their assets. The result was a collection of the names of all the larger industrial corporations and also additional names of companies in other groups.

The companies used for the selected group of largest companies were selected by taking the top 150 industrial companies, and the companies in other categories, except financial, in the same asset range, which had any patents. The dividing point came at assets of $150 million and hence the selected group of largest corporations includes all the nonfinancial corporations with assets of over $150 million, with some possible omissions of noninudstrial companies. The total number of companies in the selected group which received any patents was 176.

The composite list of the largest corporationg which was obtained from the sources and in the manner mentioned would possibly be incomplete with respect to transportation, utility, trade, construction and service companies, except in its upper range, but this deficiency would be of little consequence in considering the number of patents issued to the group.

In general, very few financial companies hold any patents; the few that do would hold them as trustee or in connection with a mortgage. Financial companies have hence been excluded from the group of large companies. Transportation companies also hold very few patents. The Department of Commerce list of the 200 largest nonfinancial companies includes 34 transportation companies; of this number 29 took out no patents and the remaining 5 received only an average of 11 each. Utility companies, with only a few known exceptions, are not holders of large numbers of patents. The Department of Commerce list of 200 includes 47 electric and gas utility companies; of this number 38 had no patents and the remaining 9 averaged 11 patents each. Trade and service companies also hold very few patents.

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DISTRIBUTION OF PATENTS ISSUED TO CORPORATIONS

hearings of that Committee, in Part 3: Patents, pages 845-848 and exhibits 183-191 on pages 1125-1129. Essentially the figures were obtained by counting all the patents issued to each corporation, on an annual basis, for the years 1931-37, and for the first half of the year 1938. The counting was done from the same cumulative index of patentees used here, as it then existed. The period chosen for the actual count of patents is explained by the fact that this cumulative index was started in 1931. For the years prior to 1931, in order to extend some of the data to include 17 years, samples, interpolations, and other methods of estimating were used.

Table 5 is an arrangement of some of the prior data for the years 1936, 1937, and 1938 (for the latter year the percentages obtained from the count for the first 6 months were applied to the patents issued during the entire year). The percentage of patents issued to the selected group of corporations varies little during these 3 years, and the other data also vary only a little in percentage from the percentages for the entire 3 years.

TABLE 5.-Patents issued to corporations, 1936-38

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The large corporations in that study were corporations with assets of over $50 million. The basic list used was a list of industrial corporations with total assets of $50 million and over, compiled by the Federal Trade Commission in 1938. This list contained 178 names, but only 151 were "industrial corporations" as the term is used in the recent list published by Fortune magazine, the others being trade and service companies.' Hence the group of large corporations of the 1938 study included the top 151 industrial corporations plus the companies in other categories in the same asset range to which any patents were issued. The total number of corporations in the group considered, to which patents had been issued, was 157.8 Patents issued to subsidiaries of these companies were added to the patents

This list was published in Federal Licensing of Corporations, hearings before a subcommittee of the Committee on the Judiciary of the U. S. Senate, 75th Cong., pt. 4, March 1938, pp. 786-792. See footnote 5, supra.

TNEC hearings, pt. 3, exhibits 183, 184, p. 1125.

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issued to the parent companies in obtaining the data repeated in the first line of table 5.'

7. ANNUAL NUMBER AND PERCENTAGE OF PATENTS ISSUED TO CORPORATIONS, 1936-55

Some figures which were already on hand, relating to the number of patents issued annually to corporations, have been augmented and arranged for inclusion in this report. The annual tables presented are for the years 1936-55, inclusive, the 3 years 1936-38 having been added to make an even 20-year period; the figures in these tables are partly estimates.

Table 6 lists the total number of patents (excluding reissues and design and plant patents) issued annually in each of the 20 years covered, the number issued to United States corporations, the number issued to foreign corporations, the total issued to corporations, the number issued to individuals, and the number issued to the United States Government (excluding the Alien Property Custodian; patents issued to the Alien Property Custodian are included in the patents issued column but have not been separately listed).

Table 7 lists the annual percentages of the data given in columns 2 to 6 of table 6.

The data published in the TNEC hearings comprised nine tables and charts, exhibits 183 to 191, pp. 1125 to 1129, with a small amount of discussion during the oral hearing, pp. 815-848.

Exhibits 183 and 184 are charts showing the annual number and percentage of patents issued to the group of 157 large corporations (including subsidiaries) for the years 1921-38.

Exhibit 155 is a chart showing the number of patents issued per each $1 billion of their total assets, to the group of 157 large corporations, for each of the years 1921-37. It was criticized during the bearings (pp. 845, 846) as having no particular meaning since large companies with only 1 or 2 patents would be included.

Exhibits 188 and 187 are charts showing the annual number and percentage of patents issued to all corporations and to foreign corporations, and also repeating the curves of exhibits 183 and 184; except for the noninclusion of data of this latter type, figures 3 and 4 of the present study are similar to these exhibits. Exhibit 188 is a diagram showing the number of patents Issued from January 1, 1931, to June 30, 1938, which were acquired from individuals after issuance by the three groups of corporations (the 157 large corporations, other United States corporations, and foreign corporations) during this period.

Exhibits 189 and 190 are tables which, taken together, are similar in form to table 4 of the present report. The data are not comparable, however, since In exhibits 189 and 190 the patents of subsidiaries were not combined with the parent corporations and the numbers are not only patents issued to the corporations but an estimate of the total number of patents owned by theta, the number of patents issued (which was estimated) having been increased by a factor to obtain an estimate of the number of patents owned by the corporations in the various groups.

Exhibit 191 is a detail table showing the number of corporations receiving only 1 to 8 patents during the 71⁄2 years of the count.

It does not appear that any explanatory written report was prepared in 1938. Some details regarding the study which have been referred to in the present report were obtained from a few internal memorandums which have been found.

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TABLE 7.-Annual percentage of patents issued to corporations

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The data presented in these tables were obtained in the following manner. The number and percentage of patents issued to corporations in the 3 years 1936, 1937, and 1938 are from the study made in 1938. See table 5. The number and percentage for 1955 were obtained by counting the patents issued to corporations for the entire year, in the Index of Patentees for 1955. For the intervening years, 1939-54, the number and percentage of patents issued to corporations were estimated by counting the patents (from the Official Gazette) issued to corporations for a full month at 6-month intervals. That

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