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How many patent applications are filed each year?
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office currently receives more than 300,000 patent applications each year and expects that number to quadruple by 2006. Universities have been filing increasing numbers of patent applications since the Bayh-Dole Act became law in 1980; they filed more than 4,800 U.S. patent applications in fiscal year 1998.
In 1999, IBM Corp. received the largest number of U.S. patents of any company: 2,756. (IBM also received the most in every year back to 1994.) After IBM in 1999 came NEC Corp. (1,842 patents); Canon K.K. (1,795); Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. (1,545); Sony Corp. (1,410); Toshiba Corp. (1,200); Fujitsu Ltd. (1,192); Motorola Inc. (1,192); Lucent Technologies (1,152); and Mitsubishi Denki K.K. (1,054). The U.S. government received the largest number of U.S. patents of any organization in 1993, but by 1998 its annual total of 1,017 patents left it outside the top 10 patent-receiving organizations.
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