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."

Comments

patents

[sometwo]

Everything that can be invented has been invented.
-- Charles Duell, Director of U.S. Patent Office, 1899

Re:patents

[savagedome]

"We don't even give a crap anymore. No really"
-- Director of U.S. Patent Office, 1999

Matsushita Good, Sony Bad

[Dancin_Santa]

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.

IBM's Patent Culture - an anecdote

[tfinniga]

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.

Re:four digits?

[Dolda2000]

I don't understand how one corporation can have 3,248 original ideas.

Original ideas? I thought this was patents we were talking about.

Re:Before the "where's microsoft"...

[HiThere]

Much as I despise the patent system, I must disagree with you. Many of these companies actually ARE innovating. Many of them ARE doing real discovery. (That said, yes, most of the patents applied for by even these companies are garbage. They are playing the game by the rules that have been written. That they may be lousy rules isn't something they consider very much [except when getting sued because they didn't patent, e.g., waiting in line to use the john on an airplane by holding a ticket instead of by standing in the aile.: Patented by IBM and dedicated to the public as a good will measure].)

These patents were filed 3 or 4 years ago

[louarnkoz]

There is a delay between the time a patent is applied for and the time it is allocated. The patent office is throughly congested, and the delay keeps increasing. Nowadays, it is at least 3 or 4 years. The statistics in the parent article describe the patents granted in 2004. The corresponding applications were probably done in 1999, 2000 or 2001.

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.

Building corporate goodwill

[tepples]

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.