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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."
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.
Somewhere that they were going to freely allow use on around 3000 of them? That's pretty righteous.
Inane Comments are Generously Disregarded
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.
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.
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.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
...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.
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.
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
more than triple the number of patents earned by rival Hewlett-Packard
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
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).
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
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...
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
> 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.
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