I am working to organize the 23,414 API related patents from between 2005 and present day, submitted by 4,283 companies–present in my API patent research. Not all of these APIs are “web APIs”, but I think each companies portfolio tells a lot of what they are doing with APIs, their motivations behind, and is also a reflection on the overall state of the industry.
To help me better understand the growth in API related patents I’m slicing and dicing the data, and publishing in different ways–I recently dumped the number of patents by year and published as a D3.js bar chart.
It is pretty depressing to see the growth in patent applications that mention “application programming interface”. I’m not sure what this means, but I know it can’t be good for making the web work. I’ll keep slicing and dicing things, and see if I can keep deriving any meaning from it all. I’m thinking I will publish each companies patent portfolio by itself, as I work to profile each company to see what they are up to with APIs.
