Tencent and Facebook. Display Screen patents in 2013.

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Here we look at two Design patents for a Display Screen with Graphical User Interface (GUI) from U.S.-based Facebook (patent USD725666) and China-based Tencent Technology (patent USD725670) which, among other commercial activities, provides comparable social networking services to that of Facebook, and has their largest customer base in China. Both patent applications where filed in the first quarter of 2013 and are dated as of the 31th of March 2015 with terms of 14 years.

Their patent claims are similar. From Facebook's patent : “The ornamental design for a display Screen with graphical user interface, as shown and described.” From Tencent's patent: “The ornamental design for an display Screen portion with animated graphical user interface, as shown and described.” Both include sketches of the mobile screen with a GUI outlined. It is moreover interesting to note that the two companies have not cited any of the same (U.S.) patent documents as part of their application (layer 0 cited patents), considering their apparent overlapping design.
Facebook 2013 Display Screen Patent. Map illustrating the distribution of individuals listed as inventors in the patent application (Layer 0), and the distribution of the inventors in the patents cited by patent application (Layer 1), etc..
Tencent 2013 Display Screen Patent. Map illustrating the distribution of individuals listed as inventors in the patent application (Layer 0), and the distribution of the inventors in the patents cited by patent application (Layer 1), etc..
It almost seems that Tencent's patent is one step behind on Facebook's patent. Tencent's layer 1 patent inventors are both located in the US - one of them in the San Francisco area, where Facebook's layer 0 patent inventors are located. Facebooks's layer 1 patent inventors are located in the Northern US and in London, while their layer 2 patent inventors are located all across mostly the US, Northern Europe, Japan and South Korea. Tencent's layer 2 patent inventors, on the other hand, are less numerous and still exclusively in the US and Japan. It is only in fact it's layer 3 inventors that are located accross the globe, though to much less of an extent than Facebook's layer 3 inventors. In any case, the correspondance between the two networks at layer 3 is about 42%, which is fairly large, but expected, as the two patents are very similar. It is in fact more surprising that this similarity is only at 7.5% in layer 2.

Similarities table
Similarity
0 0.000000
1 0.000000
2 0.074879
3 0.415884