Patent searchers carefully scrutinize Patent Assignee information in their efforts to determine who owns the patent’s rights at the time of publication. This approach leaves a gap as the rights can pass from the original assignee to someone else after the patent was granted. This could be due to the sale of IP assets, mergers, acquisitions, and corporate reorganizations.
Available in CA/Caplus for search and display, new Ultimate Owner data provides information on the current owner:
/UO – Ultimate Owner
/UOS – Ultimate Owner Standardized
The data is carefully sourced and curated by LexisNexis:
Verification using at least two separate data sources
Reassignments
Review of M&A news resources, company history resources, and corporate register information
Corrections of misspellings in UO/UOS data
Both UO and UOS are available for search and display in CAplus. Among the predefined display formats that now
include UO and UOS are BIB, STD, ALL, and MAX. A sample record appears below:
The new information also appears in displays for CASREACT and MARPAT.
The Database Summary Sheets in CA/CAplus, CASREACT, and MARPAT are being updated to reflect the availability of the new fields.