This is a follow-up post from a recent discussion of assignee-applicants. About 40% of recently filed patent applications are filed without listing any particular assignee in the patent document. One comment queried what percentage of those cases are actually assigned. To start on an answer to that question, I pulled up data on patents issued over the past 10 years and identified the percentage of patents that issue with no assignee designated at the time of patent issuance. The chart below shows that this percentage is now well under 10%.
