Patent Citations ----
From Data_rox's link, there in fact is an accepted impartial academic mechanism to assign relative value to individual patents or families of patents to relieve the simple patent count, as with the Goodman and Myers report. (In fact, Glimstedt even uses the phrase "simple patent count" as an unrefined, uninformative view of the data).
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"Most patents contain a list of previous patents, so called ‘citations’. The original function of citations is to delimit the scope of the property rights awarded by the patent. Thus, if patent B cites patent A, it implies that patent A represents a piece of previously existing knowledge upon which patent B builds, and over which B cannot have a claim. The applicant has legal duty to disclose any knowledge of “prior art”, but the decision regarding which patents to cite ultimately rests with the patent examiner.
The presumption is thus that citations are informative links between patented innovations. First, citations made may constitute a trail for spillovers, i.e. the fact that patent B cites patent A may be indicative of knowledge flowing from A to B; second, citations received may be telling of the‘importance’ of the cited patent.
Granted the use of forward citations, a sensible weighting scheme must be constructed. A straightforward possibility is to weight each patent by the actual number of citations that it subsequently received. This linear weighting scheme then assigns a value of one to all citations and all patents (Trajtenberg 1990). [pp 43-44]
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Weighting the UMTS patents by citations received, the high importance of the US R&D is revealed with its champion Qualcomm from San Diego, California. This measure has been used to indicate the centrality of a discovery to the particular technological field .
US patents (e.g. Qualcomm) have received far more citations than for example the patents held by Swedish, Finnish and German firms (e.g. Ericsson, Nokia, Siemens). The centrality of US research is further confirmed by the fact that US companies are the holders of the very key patents (e.g. Qualcomm, Motorola, Pactel) as indicated by patents with more than 50 citations received per patent. [pp 29-30]"
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Glimstedt also uses a heirarchical grouping of the patents, which includes architectural, sub-architectural and then functional patents.
Architectural patent citations at the time of Glimstedt's paper:
Qualcomm 761
Motorola 163
Pactel 78
Ericsson 39
Nokia 32
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There's a basis here for continuation of existing royalties with or without expirations.
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