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Patents Changing Hands
U.S. patents and applications transferred between companies each month, all transfers and between unrelated companies
Plays the chart through its history. Pauses are where the data set a record or moved most.
Palanor classification of USPTO patent assignment recordations, by the month the USPTO recorded them. A transfer is company to company when every assignor and the receiving party are organizations; transfers inside one group (same leading name on both sides) are counted separately as intra-group. Counted in patents and applications, so one portfolio sale can move a month.
How much patented technology companies buy and sell. Each month counts the patents and applications on recorded company-to-company assignments; the lower line leaves out moves inside one corporate group.
What this chart reads
- Patents Changing Hands Between Companies (Monthly)as “Company to company”latest 2026-05-01
- Patents Sold Between Unrelated Companies (Monthly)as “Between unrelated companies”latest 2026-05-01
Sources
Patents Changing Hands Between Companies (Monthly). Source: United States Patent and Trademark Office, www.uspto.gov. Patent Assignment XML (Ownership) Text from the USPTO Open Data Portal: the annual backfile (recordations from August 1980 to 9 April 2026) and the daily files after it. Public domain. The classification (who is on each side of a transfer, which transfers stay inside one group, and which properties are AI) is Palanor's; the rules are in the methodology above.
Patents Sold Between Unrelated Companies (Monthly). Source: United States Patent and Trademark Office, www.uspto.gov. Patent Assignment XML (Ownership) Text from the USPTO Open Data Portal: the annual backfile (recordations from August 1980 to 9 April 2026) and the daily files after it. Public domain. The classification (who is on each side of a transfer, which transfers stay inside one group, and which properties are AI) is Palanor's; the rules are in the methodology above.
Charts are drawn from Palanor's signal library and recomputed from source data on every view. Transformations (changes, indexing, year-on-year rates) are Palanor's.