Big Blue Tops US Patent List
It was announced today that IBM was granted 4,186 patents by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in 2008.
The number is a record for Armonk-based IBM Corp. and marks the 16th year in a row that the computer giant has led the world in U.S. patents. IBM is the only company to top 4,000 patents.
The No. 2 patent holder, Samsung Electronics, was awarded 3,515 patents last year. No. 3 Canon obtained 2,114.
As part of today's announcement of its record patent count, IBM is also rolling out plans to publish more articles about its technology outside the patent process, thereby making them freely available.
Big Blue expects to increase by 50 percent the number of technical innovations published, to more than 3,000 articles in 2009.
Just as a patent can spur innovation, a publication does so without conferring exclusive rights on the inventor, said Manny Schecter, associate general counsel for intellectual property law for IBM.
"What we're saying here is that as innovation continues to grow, it's becoming more important to get more information, in addition to our patent portfolio, into the public knowledge. We want to do that to encourage innovation," Schecter said.
Some of IBM's technical articles are published in scientific journals, but many others are put online on sites such as IP.com, a Web registry that helps companies manage their intellectual property.
Schecter said IBM publishes articles in all of the same fields in which it receives patents - from microprocessors to software to business processes - but will emphasize technology it is trying to encourage.
For instance, IBM has published articles on radio frequency identification, or RFID, because while the computer giant doesn't make RFID tags it does market technology that goes with them, like software and services.
"Sometimes one might decide that an invention, though patentable, isn't strategic, and might publish that to get the information into the public domain," Schecter said.
