There are patents that are disclosed just one month after filing — battery companies file three times more than automakers.

Patents are typically disclosed 18 months after filing. However, battery companies have been consistently disclosing patents within a month of filing. We counted all domestic patents disclosed by eight companies within the same month and examined one case each of early disclosures to identify reasons. Among the 112 cases examined, there was no case where an application was submitted to expedite disclosure.

Patents are automatically disclosed 18 months after filing

A patent system grants rights not as a price for hiding an invention, but as a price for making it available for anyone to read. Therefore, patent law has set that the content must be disclosed 1 year and 6 months after the filing date, regardless of whether the examination has ended. Since these documents appear in the world before the examination, they are called published patent application, meaning that what company is attached to what technology becomes visible from the outside after that much time.

The fact that this system is driven by the calendar becomes clear when counting the records of the eight companies. The eight companies confirmed this time had a median number of days between the filing date and the disclosure date of 554 days, which is almost exactly aligned with the 548 days that correspond to the 1 year and 6 months set by law. The values of the eight companies clustering at this single point indicate that most filings are disclosed not by human decision, but according to the calendar.

However, there are cases where the disclosure occurs within a month of the filing.

When the number of days between the disclosure date and the filing date is listed by company, a large cluster around 554 days and a smaller group far from it are both visible. The smaller group, with intervals within ten days, is found in more than ten cases per company, which cannot be explained by chance or input errors. This pattern is especially common in battery companies, and the titles of these patents all relate to the battery body or its components.

At first glance, this pattern might suggest the company requested early publication, and patent law actually allows applicants to release their applications immediately without waiting eighteen months if they request. Publication is necessary so that others using the same technology can be warned and later compensation requested, so this choice is not without reason. Therefore, we checked one by one whether our assumption was correct among those marked for early publication.

After opening all 112 cases one by one, there were no applications for early publication.

For the six companies' early publication cases, LG Energy Solution randomly selected 30 cases, while the remaining five companies obtained the full set of bibliographic information for relevant cases through the Korean Intellectual Property OfficeKorean Intellectual Property Office
Regulator · Website search service. The source of the application and the claimed date are clearly listed in the bibliographic information fields. All 112 cases examined were explained by one of the two scenarios. The third scenario did not appear at all.

In either case, the disclosure schedule of the new application is aligned with the date of the earlier application, not the filing date of the new one. A divisional application derived from the original application counts eighteen months from the date the original application was filed, and a domestic priority claim application that claims the date of an earlier application also follows the same method. If the earlier date has already exceeded eighteen months, the new application is disclosed immediately upon filing, meaning the application arrived only after the clock had fully run out, not because the applicant acted quickly.

The same battery industry has a fivefold difference in ratios.

When eight companies are cut into the same month and counted in the same way, the companies stand out more than the industry itself. This is because while three battery sets remain split into two and one without being grouped together, three complete vehicle and component companies cluster closely together.

When considering only batteries and finished vehicles, it is unclear whether the higher side is originally higher. To address this, Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics, which file many patents, were counted in the same period and manner and placed together in the table. The two companies at the top among the eight are LG Energy Solution and SK On, which are higher than the two included for comparison. At the bottom is Samsung SDI.

The three companies producing the same product appear to differ more in how they manage rights than in technological differences. However, there is no evidence in these records that the company spending more always comes out ahead, as division and assertion of priority rights involve costs and require re-examination.

Batteries are filed again within a month, and complete vehicles within eight months.

Looking at the intervals rather than the ratios reveals that the two industries behave similarly but at different speeds. When considering only early disclosure cases and calculating the median between filing and disclosure, the two battery cases are within a month, while the complete vehicle and parts companies range from eight to sixteen months. The shorter this interval, the earlier the prior filing date that the new filing is trying to capture.

Most early disclosure cases from battery companies are concentrated in a single international classification symbol for batteries and their components, H01M. This reflects a pattern where a company repeatedly files the same patent family over several years, splitting or supplementing it.

The situation is different for automakers. Because their technology distribution is broader, early disclosure cases from Hyundai Motor and Kia include driving control, batteries, and video encoding, while Hyundai Mobis has the most in communications. If the long intervals of eight to sixteen months overlap, it is often interpreted to mean that instead of digging into older families, they frequently resubmit applications filed about a year ago.

What this calculation does not say

This calculation clearly has three limitations. First, it is based on results from company names, so applications filed under subsidiary or research institute names are excluded, and joint applications are counted for both sides. The identical numbers for Hyundai Motor and Kia also result from the fact that the two companies file almost all applications jointly.

Second, the period counted was only one month, and since patent disclosures tend to cluster on a weekly basis, the ratio could shift by several percentage points if another month were selected. The longest period where the disclosure records of all eight companies overlapped was this one month, so the analysis was aligned with it.

Third, this article did not check whether the patents were registered. Since disclosure occurs before the examination process is completed, the items listed in the table do not necessarily mean the rights have been finalized. A patent is a document describing future plans, not proof that a product has been released.

The day the reader will verify next

The original text read in this article is only one application record submitted by the company to the patent office. No disclosures or papers were written. Unlike disclosures or papers, the record is composed solely of receipt order and dates, so if the same calculation is rerun later, the values can be directly compared as they are.

First, the same search can be rerun three months later to see whether the gap between LG Energy Solution and Samsung SDI remains. If the order remains unchanged even when the period is altered, it can be interpreted as a company's habit. Next, by collecting the original application numbers attached to the early disclosure items of the battery set, it becomes clear which family of patents is currently being split. If the filing years of that family are around 2020, it suggests that the company is currently revising applications from the period when the prismatic and pouch cell competition was intense.