Changes

==Table Purpose==

Assignment of a patent is defined by the USPTO as giving or selling part or all of a party's ownership or interest in a patent or patent application. The assignor, original or current patent owner, transfers these rights to the assignee. Therefore, the assignee table is used to keep track of current patent ownership and all claims to a patent. Our academic projects are restricted to the study of US patents. The assignee table will ideally allow us to distinguish which patents are US based. Once the dataset also contains information on patent litigation, the assignee table may allow us to correlate transfer of ownership to settlement and case resolutions.

==Current Problems==