Why does a patent show a different assignee on the patentRatings system than on other websites?
Most other patent websites show only the ‘original’ Assignee for a patent, that is, the Assignee as reflected on the patent’s face. The Original Assignee information on those sites is not updated if and when a patent is subsequently re-assigned to another entity. Therefore, the PatentRatings system uses an updated ‘Current Assignee’ based on the USPTO’s Assignment database records in order to properly reflect the most recent owner of a patent. Of course, even this data is subject to a certain error rate caused by errors in the USPTO data itself. If a patent is simultaneously held by multiple assignees, we show the first current patent assignee of record by default.
