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USPTO Released List of Top 10 Patent Receivers
prostoalex writes "So who received the most patents in 2004? Despite the frequent publicity around Microsoft's or Amazon's frivolous patents, these two companies are not even on the list. IBM, Matsushita and Canon received the most patents in 2004, followed by HP, Micron, Samsung, Intel, Hitachi, Toshiba and Sony. IBM alone was granted 3,248 patents last year."
IBM is notorious for making people write papers and patents as part of their job description.
Vote for Pedro
I don't understand how one corporation can have 3,248 original ideas.
Everything that can be invented has been invented.
-- Charles Duell, Director of U.S. Patent Office, 1899
Remember, these companies actually innovated something.
And if you're wondering what the hell Matsushita is, well, they basically own everything.
Working with these two companies closely (lots of PSP and big screen TVs delivered this year), there is one thing that I've noticed with regards to these two companies.
Matsushita is the good guys. They license their technology out at very low prices, and if a competitor invents a similar technology, they are very unlikely to bring down the weight of their patent portfolio on them.
Sony, OTOH, is the typical portfolio protector. They are very difficult to work with because their tight-fistedness with patents and IP means that everything they do needs to be negotiated and agreements have to be made between many different IPR holders just to come up with a new product.
This is also why Matsushita (Panasonic, if you didn't know) is almost universally loved and Sony continues to put out shoddy merchandise.
I knew a guy who did an internship at IBM - I think he helped do internal IT for their boxes. Anyhow, while he was there, he was showing someone a neat trick he did with the init system on the linux boxes, so that it'd start up an interactive shell on a different terminal as soon as possible. The advantage being that if some process held up the boot, you could fix it (ie kill -9). I think dhcp was a big culprit on the distro they were using.
Anyhow, his boss recommended that he get a patent on the change.
So, I'm not too surprised to see them on the list.
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"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;" U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 8.
No mention of individuals; just Authors and Inventors.
What?
That and a culture of research and development.
You get a lot of smart people, ask that they publish, and watch what happens.
Add that to the understanding that licensing is just free money for stuff you don't feel like building yourself, and it's very smart.
My mom says I'm cool.
The top patent recipients are actually innovating, leveraging their R&D power and making progress instead of leveraging their lawyer power and hindering progress in legal battles.
IBM has been filing patents for many years, and has maintained more or less the same level over the years. On the other hand, four years ago, we did not hear much about Microsoft filing patents. So, their absence in the top 10 is not all that surprising.
Don't forget that IBM develops products other than software. Gasp! They develop hardware too! Hardware patents have been around as long as hardware has been around. I doubt many people here really care about them, and they aren't a threat to Open-Source software.
It's those stupid little software patents that are the issue. IBM doesn't need to give 1 patent to open-source, but 500 is more than enough to be considered 'a lot' by my books.
Don't look a gift horse in the mouth. If IBM wants to give you something for free, take it!
Corporations are considered "the good guys" if their corporate culture involves building goodwill through being a good corporate citizen. Goodwill can be monetized as the value of a corporation's trademarks.
I can't resist mentioning this silly episode.
:: "cook").
In July 1992, I was attending an IEEE 802.11 meeting. The company I worked for at the time was making a major series of presentations - "coming out of the closet", as it were, after many months of revealing nothing whatsoever about their WLAN development program.
At one point, the presenter (a colleague of mine) was asked, "Your error correction scheme seems extreme. Do you really think interference in the 2.4 GHz band is going to be that bad?"
My colleague pointed to me (in the audience) and asked me to repeat a remark I had made during a coffee break, where I said, "Well, I've never seen such a thing as a Listen Before Cook microwave oven!"
("Listen Before Talk" was a new phrase coined by one of the committee members to defuse more silliness of arguing over the term "carrier sense", which had a somewhat different meaning to RF engineers as opposed to Ethernet engineers. I found the analogy appropriate -- i.e. "talk"
I got a brief chuckle from the committee, but no mention in the meeting minutes, so the event was lost in obscurity.
However, years later, I was searching for a particular kind of patent for a microwave oven invention I had in mind, when I came across:
Patent No. 6,346,692: "Adaptive Microwave Oven". In brief, this patent describes an invention wherein a microwave oven "listens" to the 2.4 GHz band before turning on its magnetron, on a cycle-by-cycle basis, so as to avoid interference with RF communications in the same spectrum. I.E. "Listen Before Cook." The patent was awarded in 2002 to two persons (presumably) employed by Agere Systems, since Agere is the assignee for this patent.
How's that for prior art?
P.S. My "other" microwave oven invention had to do with "listening to the sound of popping corn" to determine when the pop rate was declining, thereby determining the right time to turn off the oven, avoiding the Blackened Redenbacher Syndrome. Sadly, I was beat to that particular punch -- a broader patent existed that covered "auditory feedback" in controlling microwave oven operation.
What you don't hear about is that fact that to file a patent, one must present the idea in front of a committee (called an Invention Evaluation Board) which does an initial search on the idea and evaluation of business value, then the patent lawyers do their own internal search (before sending to the patent office), then you write up the patent with a lawyer (all the time modifying to take into account any existing work), then IBM sends the patent to the patent office so the patent office can do it's search.
By the time IBM sends out a patent, it's already gone through an exhaustive evaluation by very intelligent people. Patents cost a lot of money to file. IBM has no interest in filing useless patents. And yes, there is a culture that if an idea seems at all novel then file a disclosure because we have such a strong process in place to determine if that idea should become a patent.
And is IBM using it's portfolio to do negatively? Nope. Patents are a necessary evil. Any large company has to file patents to protect itself. Being that IBM is the largest technology company in existance (320,000 employees, revenue of $86 billion a year), it's only fitting that it files the most patents.
It is PR because a lot of free software users think well of a company that is apparently doing its best to support free software against the scourge of software patents. But how many of these do know that IBM has been and still is at the forefront of political lobbying for more software patents in the world?
Making free software depend on IBM patents, and making the defense of free software against lawsuits depend on IBM willingness to assert those patents against whoever would sue free software developpers or users (see the IBM pledge : http://www.ibm.com/ibm/licensing/patents/pledgedpa tents.pdf) gives IBM a lot of leverage on whatever happens with free software.
Furthermore, free software has been able to compete successfully with Microsoft, and to contain to some extent Microsoft software power, a thing no corporation was able to do, including IBM.
From an economic perspective, when two economic activities are complementary, and actually done by different corporations, each business sector will try to commoditize the neighboring business so that more money and profit remain available for its own activity. Commoditization of complementary business is also a way to reduce its control, and to be freer ans more secure when it comes to managing a business strategy.
This is the case for software vs services, or for hardware vs software. IBM business is mostly based on hardware and services, and software publishing is only a minor part. But software stand between the two main business activities of IBM, and gives too much leverage to whoever controls software publishing, not to mention the profit. Supporting free software is a way of commoditizing software, and thus leave more control space and profit for IBM. If in addition it gives IBM some control over basic software (especially the operating system), all the better.
So it is IBM best interest to actually get software patents and the control that goes with them, and to make some of those patents available to free software developement.
But, mind you, it is certainly not a gift or a donation. Just good business strategy.
IBM and Microsoft can be equally as evil really. There is no difference on who receives a patent.
:)
Now IBM politics are in favour of free sw just because IBM is now making money out of Linux and Microsoft is losing money because of it.
Whenever it will be the other way around, we'll be all here crying for the evilness of IBM and how M$ could save us all. Really think about what could've happened if OS2 was the winner and Windows the loser.
Probably what now seems so absurd could have been reality.
Patents are evil, whoever receives them. And they are evil both for free sw and for proprietary one. And they are evil both for sw as for hw.
We feel sw patents being more evil just because of the peculiar qualities of sw (being a product with almost no additional costs other than those of the creation of the first prototype), but really hw patents are as evil and sometimes as stupid.
Check behind your Nokia phone, the Sim retention mechanism. Do you really feel that thing needs a patent ? Do you think its mechanic is so smarter to be granted a patent ? Do you feel that patent is much better than the "single click" Amazon patent ? [Don't know if it has been granted the patent and if it's still that kind of mechanism, the last Nokia I had was the 5110 and had two pieces of plastic with the simplest mechanic of this world patent pending]
I think we, as a society, should reconsider the whole patent system. It's effectiveness is changed in its 200 years of life, and its dangers too. Patents were meant to protect IP and R&D investiments, now it's becoming a mean to convert ideas into money without the risks involved in production.
Long post sorry