Current Assignee Field (ANC)
The current assignee is the entity who currently owns a patent or application. It may be a different entity than the name that appears on the patent (this is the applicant, or in AcclaimIP parlance, the Original Assignee).
The field code is ANC (Assignee Normalized Current).
The current assignee is different only if the new patentee registers the change of ownership with the USPTO, which is currently not a requirement. AcclaimIP processes the USPTO's assignment data weekly.
Assignee Names are normalized to account for misspellings, creative punctuation, and plain old variants of the same entity.
Examples
- ANC:IBM --> Finds documents with "IBM" in the ANC field (patents currently assigned to IBM, according to the patent office).
- ANC:(Google OR "Motorola Mobility") --> Finds documents with either name in the ANC field.
- ANC:(Google AND Stanford) --> Finds document co-assigned to both entities.
Note that you may see an asterisk ( * ) next to the current assignee's name. Since the USPTO does not require that a change in assignee be registered with their office, there might not be any assignee information available, even when an assignment has occurred. In some of these cases, AcclaimIP has been able to guess the assignee's name with a high degree of accuracy. In these cases, the names in the Assignee (Current) field will have a leading asterisk to let you know.
Important Tip:
ANC:Hewlett Packard --> Finds patents with "Hewlett" in the ANC field and "Packard" in the default field set.
If you want the ANC field to apply to both terms, then you must use parentheses (or quotation marks).
ANC:(Hewlett Packard) --> This is correct.
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