IBM Wins Most Patents In a Single Year For 2008

eldavojohn writes "You might have heard or felt that there is little left to patent these days but IBM begs to differ. They came in at over four thousand for the year of 2008. Now, this isn't a good metric to measure success or progress but for those of you who like to keep track: 'IBM said it earned 4,186 U.S. patents in 2008, more than triple the number of patents earned by rival Hewlett-Packard. Microsoft Corp earned 2,030 patents, while Intel Corp had 1,776 and Hewlett-Packard 1,424, according to the report, which compiled data from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Korean electronics giant Samsung Electronics had the second-highest number of patents at 3,515.' You can find the original source of this study here as well as 2007's data and even 2006's data."

Comments

Weird

[Idiomatick]

IBM/Samsung make THINGS so that makes sense. How did MS get so many? They don't make any THING aside from xbox. You think the divide would be alot bigger than it is.

Re:Weird

[El Lobo]

1) They make THINGS as well: mice, keyboards, XBoxes, etc.

2) You don't need to make THINGS to get a pattent. You can patent almost anything these days. Software algorithms are especially important for such companies like Microsoft if they don't want to be eaten by patent trolls, which is so common these days.

Re:Weird

[GameMaster]

While it is true that, at least, some of MS's patents are for hardware, most of them are, probably, software related. As far as patent trolls are concerned, I think you have it backwards. There would be noe patent trolls to defend against if we didn't allow software patents in the first place. Software is, simply, a math notation and we used to have the brains to rule that people couldn't patent math.

Re:Weird

[mdf356]

The Federal Circuit recently ruled en banc that if your patent doesn't involve specific physical things, it's not actually patentable. So at the moment any software not tied to a specific hardware device is invalid again.

What Congress does with this will be interesting to see. They were taking up patent reform several times in the last session. Probably half or more of IBM's patents are on software methods.

Re:Weird

[Arthur Grumbine]

You can patent almost anything these days

Not anymore - "Almost Anything" was IBM's 3,621st patent of last year...

Re:Weird

[bob.appleyard]

What proection are they against trolls, though? They don't infringe any patents, so what use is developing a defensive portfolio against them?

I read

[popeye44]

Somewhere that they were going to freely allow use on around 3000 of them? That's pretty righteous.

Doesn't maintaining patents cost money?

[blind biker]

I was talking the other day with colleagues that were pondering whether to patent an idea they had, or not. The counter-argument was that it cost substantial money to just maintain a patent - and the figures mentioned were several thousands of USD a year. IBM acquired 4000 patents in a single year. That makes me wonder how many patents are they maintaining nowadays? And if they pay, say, $5000 to maintain each, isn't that a substantial financial burden?

And if it isn't - shouldn't it be?

Re:Doesn't maintaining patents cost money?

[compro01]

The maintenance fee for a patent increases as the patent ages.

There's the filing, search, and examination fees when you apply for it (fees depends on what type of patent it is), then the issue fee if/when it is approved (again, variable depending on type), and reissue fees if you're reapplying when your previous application was rejected (variable), then maintenance fees due at 3.5 years ($980), 7.5 years ($2480), and 11.5 years ($4110) after the patent is granted.

The most of the fees are halved for "small entities".

If I'm adding correctly, the total cost of filing, acquiring, and maintaining a utility patent (assuming it gets through on the first try) is about $10,170 and a design patent is about $8,890.

Re:Doesn't maintaining patents cost money?

[Zakabog]

...And if they pay, say, $5000 to maintain each, isn't that a substantial financial burden?

And if it isn't - shouldn't it be?

That would probably hurt more than it would help. If we make maintaining patents cost prohibitive to a company like IBM, who does that benefit? If you've got a really good idea it shouldn't be too expensive to patent it, otherwise you're completely defeating the purpose of the patent system. Yes I know there are flaws in the system, but making it more expensive to patent things only helps the large companies that can afford it, not the small companies that might have some big ideas.

Re:Doesn't maintaining patents cost money?

[moderatorrater]

Let's not forget that they pay their employees (my uncle, in this case) nearly $1000 per patent they get granted for IBM. That's a cost of $4 million just to the employee that does it.

Re:Doesn't maintaining patents cost money?

[Prof.Phreak]

If we make maintaining patents cost prohibitive to a company like IBM, who does that benefit?

How about letting the patent holder determine how much it is worth, and then -they- have to pay a... property tax (or something) on that every year to maintain it. Maybe waive the fee for the first year or two. The catch is that if they say it's worth $1billion, they have to pay tax on -that-. Yet if they say it's worth $1, their tax goes away, but any future lawsuits they initiate concerning the patent would be similarly worthless (ie: ``you're infringing on my $1 patent, pay up!'').

That would eliminate corps sitting on patents and not doing anything with them...

Re:Doesn't maintaining patents cost money?

[compro01]

I would presume with the amount of patents said companies deal with, they'd just have their own patent attorneys in house on salary.

Re:Doesn't maintaining patents cost money?

[mdf356]

All companies I'm aware of use outside counsel, for a simple reason: someone to blame (and sue) if something bad happens.

If a deadline is missed on a patent with significant business value, damages can be recovered. If an attorney has been suborned and deliberately sabotages the claims, damages can be recovered. You can't get damages back from yourself if an employee is at fault.

Re:Doesn't maintaining patents cost money?

[John Hasler]

> The entire point of a patent is to allow a person or company to profit from their
> invention without other people ripping it off without doing their own research.

Not in the US. According to the Constitution the purpose of patehts is to promote progress in science and the useful arts:

"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;"

The courts have interpreted this as meaning that the point is to benefit society, not to protect an intrinsic right of an inventor to control his invention.

math FAIL

[Anonymous Coward]

'IBM said it earned 4,186 U.S. patents in 2008, more than triple the number of patents earned by rival Hewlett-Packard [...] 1,424.

Um, 1424 * 3 = 4272 > 4186 ...

Re:math FAIL

[Gat0r30y]

Clearly, they must have used one of their fancy new patented algorithms to arrive at

more than triple the number of patents earned by rival Hewlett-Packard

Re:math FAIL

[rts008]

It was calculated in Excel, on a Pentium chip?

Not Surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM employees get a bonus for filing patents (patent doesn't even need to be granted). And the process of filing is to submit your idea to a database and lawyers take care of the rest. They do filter what ones they will file. But there is definitely a lot of mud against the wall going on with that process. Also really helps to have a few filings come yearly review time.

No innovation left in the human race?

[Stile 65]

You might have heard or felt that there is little left to patent these days...

No, not so much. On the contrary, I think we're accelerating happily toward the Singularity and new inventions are very much part of that trend.

Patents can be copylefted

[tepples]

So patents are against the GPL except from the ones by IBM. Wow What is IBM pay to get FSF Support.

A patent that is freely licensed for use in copylefted software does not violate the GPL. SELinux and PlusV patents are licensed this way, and so was On2's VP3 in the early days of the Theora project.

IBM is large

[drewzhrodague]

IBM is a very large company. They make and do all kinds of things, and lots of them are patentable. I'll bet there are people who get a bit of commission if they make a certain number of patents. Also, they do some very wonderful things that deserve a patent. Wasn't there one last week?

Re:Can a [money] value be put on these patents?

[Endo13]

It reduces the chance someone will sue them.

A lot of them would be deserved

[Zouden]

When IBM is doing things like increasing the resolution of MRI by a hundred million times, I'd say they must have earned a lot of their patents. They do much more research than HP or Microsoft.

Re:A lot of them would be deserved

[darkmeridian]

IBM scientists were also responsible for the excimer laser that is used for LASIK eye surgery. They were also the dudes who wrote out "IBM" with atoms. IBM gets a lot of patents but they also do a lot of basic scientific research to earn those patents. So it's not that they "win" a lot of patents, they "earn" a lot of patents.

No, it's a new kind of math

[EmbeddedJanitor]

patented of course!

Re:Can a [money] value be put on these patents?

[freddy_dreddy]

There's a large misconception that patents are solely created to shield things off (protect) without discussion. Having worked for one of these corporations gave me an insight in what they're actually used for (although I can't generalise).
Patents in my field (micro-electronics) were used to negotiate access to other patents. Corp. A holds a patent which Corp. B needs: the two sit around the table (a number of times) and B has to offer something in return - access to B's patents in most cases.
All these things are negotiated behind closed doors, only a small fraction of the cases result in court cases, but in my experience the patent is then used in it's true sense: to protect R&D or potential thereof.
Yes: there are patents which just put a lock on an idea. But these grant the patent holder access to the patent portfolio of other companies. Such patents -in almost al cases- focus on a small amount of very well-chosen corporations, to get access to their portfolio. If they don't give in it normally ends in court, there are a lot of cases like this - notably the David vs Goliath cases. You could compare it to some extent with registering a domain and sitting back and waiting to see if they'll pay up.

Or

[deblau]

You could get the data directly from the USPTO here. They support full boolean searches on a large number of fields. For example, a search for "international business machines" as the assignee in the patent database shows that IBM has 52,781 patents (some of which are expired). Narrowing the search to those issued in the last year shows 4166 patents issued in 2008. The exact query I used was (an/"international business machines" and isd/20080101->20081231) without the parens. You can search patents and published applications -- IBM currently shows 27685 applications pending (and that's just those that have published since 2001).

Re:Same at many places

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Now if only these companies would start offering bonuses for finding prior art that invalidated competitors' patents, maybe we'd see an end to some of the patent insanity.

Triple?

[__aabvlw4075]

Since when is 4186 "more than triple" 1424?

Re:earned?

[ClosedSource]

Why sue other companies when those companies are scared shitless of IBM and will payup? Lots of people pay protection money rather than get beaten up. That doesn't mean it's not a protection racket.

"earned"?

[spasm]

I'm having a problem with the word "earned" in the original article. It implies work was done, beyond that needed to file the paperwork.