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October 02, 2006

Comments

David Tebbutt

Out of interest, where does this leave companies like Microsoft which determined to apply for some 3,000 patents per annum for 'innovations' such as 'Adding and removing white space from a document'?

Presumably that was to create the fear of a 'time bomb' for users of open source software.

Sanjay Dalal

Great move by IBM.

I would like to understand the correlation between Number of Patents filed by a Company and Significant Innovations produced from these Patents. I define a Significant Innovation as new, commercially released, has created a market of at least over $100 million (either by the original Patent maker or competitor), and has importantly caused imitations. I furher believe that companies should protect Significant Innovations and not necessarily every Patent that has been filed.

Michael Kenward

Watchit Tebbo. That nice Mr Gates will come and kneecap you.

The idea that counting patents is a measure of a company's creativity is deeply flawed. While IBM, Canon and co. love to appear in the USPTO's annual league tables, there's more to it than that.

There have been newspaper reports of China's ascendancy in IPR being skewed by incentives to file patents, many of which are worthless.

On IBM, it might entertain people with access to the FT's archive to read this article from five years ago:

"A gift of the family jewels: By licensing technology IBM hopes to stay in the forefront of semiconductors"

http://search.ft.com/searchArticle?queryText=Kenward+IBM&y=11&javascriptEnabled=true&id=010704001390&x=13

or

http://tinyurl.com/oczfq

and

"Companies used to ignore good ideas that they could not use directly. Now they are starting to realise others may well pay for them"


http://search.ft.com/searchArticle?queryText=Kenward+IBM&y=11&javascriptEnabled=true&id=010704001388&x=13

or

http://tinyurl.com/rx6xu

Whatever became of Jerry Rosenthal, "vice-president, intellectual property and licensing, at IBM"?

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