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IBM Has Been Awarded An Average Of 24 Patents Per Day So Far In 2016 (qz.com)
Traditional companies continue to score a huge number of patents, reports Quartz. The publication deep dived into the patent filings to find which company has been awarded the most number of patents this year. According to its finding, IBM has been awarded 3,617 patents so far this year, whereas Samsung comes close with 3,032 patents during the same period. Behind these giants sit Google with 1,530 patents, Intel with 1,293, Qualcomm with 1,262, Microsoft with 1,232, and Apple with 1,060 patents. From the report: Although IBM's patent-producing power slowed somewhat in 2015, the number of patents it's received so far this year is up more than 13% compared to a year earlier. The company is in the middle of a painful reinvention, that sees the company shifting further away from hardware sales into cloud computing, analytics, and AI services. It's also plugging away on a myriad of fundamental scientific research projects -- many of which could revolutionize the world if they can come to fruition -- which is where many of its patent applications originate. IBM accounted for about 1% of all US patents awarded in 2015.
It's hard to believe a company can produce that many novel things that need protecting
Every variation of every possibility has been legally locked up, The message I'm getting is "Don't try profiting from anything new of we'll sue you out of existence."
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
This would just cause companies to find workarounds (like they do with taxes) in order to create entities which remain under the exemption limit to file all their patents for them.
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That seems like a lot, and then you realize that IBM is on pace for 8,760 patents this year. Something is broken.
How about if we just recognize that ideas are worthless without execution?
Look, I have plenty of ideas, but I never end up pursuing most of them for various reasons (no time, no money, too risky, etc). Why should people that actually implement an idea that I had and produce good things based on it be punished because I am lazy or a coward?
Thats what IP protection does, really. It punishes those that do things, and rewards those that do nothing. Its a messed up system that is obsolete, but we cling onto it because it is a billion dollar business.
Either: 24 new inventions that required enough time and effort to warrant granting the one investing so heavily into their development protection from copycats per day, the singularity is practically on the horizon!
Or: The patent system is FUBAR and has nothing to do anymore with its alleged function.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
First time in, well, almost forever that that's happened. Yeah IBM gets a lot of patents, but they also spend a lot in R&D. Have done so since the beginning of the 20th century. In 2015 their R&D spending dropped to $5.2 billion, which dropped them out of top 20 R&D companies in the world.
........ $82b revenue ... $5.2b R&D ... 6.3% of revenue .. $196b revenue .. $14.1b R&D ... 7.2% of revenue ..... $66b revenue ... $9.8b R&D .. 14.8% of revenue ...... $56b revenue .. $11.5b R&D .. 20.6% of revenue ... $25b revenue ... $3.7b R&D .. 14.6% of revenue .. $87b revenue .. $11.4b R&D .. 13.1% of revenue ..... $183b revenue ... $6.0b R&D ... 3.3% of revenue
Here's how the others mentioned in TFA stack up:
IBM
Saumsung
Google
Intel
Qualcomm
Microsoft
Apple
Despite Apple's reputation among lay people as an innovator, they're really not. They don't use much of their income on R&D. This is their first year cracking the top 20 in R&D spending, and as you can see the percentage they spend on R&D trails far behind the others.
My idea has been to create an intellectual property tax that grows exponentially. The year the owner chooses not to pay the tax, the ip enters public domain. Start the tax small and set the curve so that you get a fair shot to use it (target 7 years). You can hold the patent (or copyright) as long as you want and can pay the tax, so an insanely profitable drug could be protected for longer than 17 years.
I dislike the double standards between physical and intellectual property. I'm told I have to pay ridiculous taxes on my home to support infrastructure. Fair enough, but then ip holders need to participate in funding the infrastructure they use for the country to defend their property rights and use.
Despite Apple's reputation among lay people as an innovator, they're really not. They don't use much of their income on R&D.
When it comes to modern patents where "one click to purchase" counts as an "invention" you cannot measure innovation by the number of patents or an R&D budget. Apple's innovations have been in design more than technology and despite that far smaller budget they seem to have come up with far more innovations than e.g. Microsoft for whom I'm struggling to come up with any recent innovative products except perhaps the Surface despite their far higher budget.
Most IBM patents are junk. There was a programme there that awarded any crap that people could think up - I blocked one about 3D spatial audio because the guy had absolutely no idea how his 'idea' could actually be implemented.
The only purpose of patents here is to provide weapons that IBM can bash other companies with (or prevent themselves being bashed by other company's patents). It only acts to discourage actual innovation by startups.
Mersault.
My idea has been to create an intellectual property tax that grows exponentially.
This already exists, in the form of patent maintenance fees. In addition to the fees one pays to get the patent to issue, to keep a patent in force one must pay fees at the 3.5, 7.5, and 11.5 year point. If any one of the fees is not paid, the patented material enters the public domain.
For large entities, the fees are $1600, $3600, and $7400, respectively.
For small entities, the fees are halved.
For "micro" entities, the fees are halved again.
As a side note, one of IBM's corporate strategies has been to patent early and often, but vigorously and mercilessly prune their portfolio at these points, when they have a better idea of the value of the invention to the company. Many, if not most, of their patents do not make even the first cut and so are allowed to enter the public domain at year 3.5.
I think my life is going to be a miserable ongoing revelation of just how much Gibson got right, way back in '84.
Heading towards that corporate controlled world, where you work for the big guys, you're operating in the crevices the light doesn't reach, or you're the exploited majority.
IBM is the biggest patent troll. Ever. Who else do you think get $2 billion a year from patent trolling alone? Why do you think IBM has so many patents? Many of the patents are really silly, obvious and has broad coverage. IBM was always considered the big bad company, until Microsoft took over the crown, but IBM has never ceased to being bad. Have you followed IBMs ugly maneuvours in the Mainframe market? Horrendous stories. Every competitor is sued, or bought. Why is IBM called the "Big Blue"? Because they have so many lawyers in blue suits. More lawyers than engineers at one point in time. What do IBM use all those lawyers for? At IBM, a lawyer is more profitable than an engineer, that is why. It was really dumb by SCO to attack IBM for Linux patent trolling, IBM is the king of patent trolling. Really really stupid by SCO, they should know that no one can extract patent profit from IBM. IBM is the big extractor. IBM needed that Linux case, to polish the bad IBM reputation. Sun Microsystems never cared about patents, until IBM nearly bankrupted Sun. After that, Sun started to patent everything and the engineers had a contest to get the goofiest patent. As told by James Gosling, father of Java: http://nighthacks.com/roller/j... "...In Sun's early history, we didn't think much of patents. While there's a kernel of good sense in the reasoning for patents, the system itself has gotten goofy. Sun didn't file many patents initially. But then we got sued by IBM for violating the "RISC patent" - a patent that essentially said "if you make something simpler, it'll go faster". Seemed like a blindingly obvious notion that shouldn't have been patentable, but we got sued, and lost. The penalty was huge. Nearly put us out of business. We survived, but to help protect us from future suits we went on a patenting binge. Even though we had a basic distaste for patents, the game is what it is, and patents are essential in modern corporations, if only as a defensive measure. There was even an unofficial competition to see who could get the goofiest patent through the system...." Another patent trolling story where IBM attorneys black mail Sun: "Pay us $20 million or we will find some IBM patents you do violate and sue you" http://www.forbes.com/asap/200... "...My own introduction to the realities of the patent system came in the 1980s, when my client, Sun Microsystems--then a small company--was accused by IBM of patent infringement. Threatening a massive lawsuit, IBM demanded a meeting to present its claims. Fourteen IBM lawyers and their assistants, all clad in the requisite dark blue suits, crowded into the largest conference room Sun had. The chief blue suit orchestrated the presentation of the seven patents IBM claimed were infringed, the most prominent of which was IBM's notorious "fat lines" patent: To turn a thin line on a computer screen into a broad line, you go up and down an equal distance from the ends of the thin line and then connect the four points. You probably learned this technique for turning a line into a rectangle in seventh-grade geometry, and, doubtless, you believe it was devised by Euclid or some such 3,000-year-old thinker. Not according to the examiners of the USPTO, who awarded IBM a patent on the process. After IBM's presentation, our turn came. As the Big Blue crew looked on (without a flicker of emotion), my colleagues--all of whom had both engineering and law degrees--took to the whiteboard with markers, methodically illustrating, dissecting, and demolishing IBM's claims. We used phrases like: "You must be kidding," and "You ought to be ashamed." But the IBM team showed no emotion, save outright indifference. Confidently, we proclaimed our conclusion: Only one of the seven IBM patents would be deemed valid by a court, and no rational court would find that Sun's technology infringed even that one. An awkward silence ensued. The blue suits did not even confer among themse