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Patents IT

USPTO Released List of Top 10 Patent Receivers 230

Posted by samzenpus from the who-owns-it dept.
prostoalex writes "So who received the most patents in 2004? Despite the frequent publicity around Microsoft's or Amazon's frivolous patents, these two companies are not even on the list. IBM, Matsushita and Canon received the most patents in 2004, followed by HP, Micron, Samsung, Intel, Hitachi, Toshiba and Sony. IBM alone was granted 3,248 patents last year."
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USPTO Released List of Top 10 Patent Receivers More

USPTO Released List of Top 10 Patent Receivers

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  • No surprise there (Score:5, Funny)

    by geekee ( 591277 ) on Wednesday January 12, 2005 @10:52PM (#11344834)
    IBM is notorious for making people write papers and patents as part of their job description.
    • No surprise at all. The company I work for has IPR competitions each year and encourages employees to submit their ideas for cash prizes, etc. It's really quite a charade because it seems like they'll consider, demand in fact, absolutely anything from anyone. My job role isn't the sort where I do any technological development and at no point during my day do I have time to sit around and come up with patentable ideas. I don't receive support for any such activity and I'd never be able to pass it off to mana
    • As are Canon (I worked for them in R&D for ten years).

  • four digits? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by freakybob ( 715183 ) on Wednesday January 12, 2005 @10:52PM (#11344835)
    I don't understand how one corporation can have 3,248 original ideas.

    • Re:four digits? (Score:5, Funny)

      by Dolda2000 ( 759023 ) <fredrik.dolda2000@com> on Wednesday January 12, 2005 @10:59PM (#11344896) Homepage
      I don't understand how one corporation can have 3,248 original ideas.
      Original ideas? I thought this was patents we were talking about.

      • Re:four digits? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by domenic v1.0 ( 610623 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @02:32AM (#11346130)
        Anybody who works for IBM knows the thickness of the IP papers they must sign just for working for the company, and if you read the fine print, they basically own everything you can conjure up while being an active employee. With 320,000+ employees, thats a lot of ideas. BUT, most people look over the fact that IBM is one of the, if not THE biggest spender in R&D, and that alone is its biggest investment. For example, the earth simulator came out and stunned the world with its 35-TFlops of supercomuting power. IBM already had 100-TFlops (when its completed, currently its at 70-TFlops) up its sleeve with its Blue Gene supercomputer waiting right around the corner.

        It's simple, IBM invests heavily in its R&D and does not jump in on marketable, fast money-making ideas that fade away as quickly as people buy into it. IBM has been innovators, and its shown by being #1 in patents for the last 11 years.

    • 320,000 employees. That's how. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by attemptedgoalie ( 634133 ) on Wednesday January 12, 2005 @11:05PM (#11344951)
      That and a culture of research and development.

      You get a lot of smart people, ask that they publish, and watch what happens.

      Add that to the understanding that licensing is just free money for stuff you don't feel like building yourself, and it's very smart.
    • I don't understand how one corporation can have 3,248 original ideas.

      I think about sex once every 7 seconds. Maybe they are all pr0n patents?

  • patents (Score:5, Funny)

    by sometwo ( 53041 ) on Wednesday January 12, 2005 @10:53PM (#11344840)
    Everything that can be invented has been invented.
    -- Charles Duell, Director of U.S. Patent Office, 1899

    • Re:patents (Score:5, Insightful)

      by savagedome ( 742194 ) on Wednesday January 12, 2005 @11:02PM (#11344932)
      "We don't even give a crap anymore. No really"
      -- Director of U.S. Patent Office, 1999

    • Re:patents (Score:5, Informative)

      by LadyLucky ( 546115 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @04:26AM (#11346574) Homepage
      Everything that can be invented has been invented.
      -- Charles Duell, Director of U.S. Patent Office, 1899

      Ever hear the context to that quote?

      He was so inundated with work, that he sought more funding from the government. He said that anyone that would deny him more money must think that "everything that can be invented has been invented".

      Changes it a bit.

  • Before the "where's microsoft"... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Stevyn ( 691306 ) on Wednesday January 12, 2005 @10:53PM (#11344843)
    Remember, these companies actually innovated something.

    And if you're wondering what the hell Matsushita is, well, they basically own everything.
    • Matsushita is Panasonic's parent company. Thay also make products under/for the following brand names: Quasar, GE, JVC, and Technics.

      sources:
      http://www.hoovers.com/matsushita-electric-indust r ial-co.,-ltd./--ID__41873--/freeuk-co-factsheet.xh tml [hoovers.com], instruction manual from my GE VCR.
      Note: Matsushita doesn't own everything, they just make everything for everyone else

  • Matsushita Good, Sony Bad (Score:5, Funny)

    by Dancin_Santa ( 265275 ) <DancinSanta@gmail.com> on Wednesday January 12, 2005 @10:55PM (#11344856) Journal
    Working with these two companies closely (lots of PSP and big screen TVs delivered this year), there is one thing that I've noticed with regards to these two companies.

    Matsushita is the good guys. They license their technology out at very low prices, and if a competitor invents a similar technology, they are very unlikely to bring down the weight of their patent portfolio on them.

    Sony, OTOH, is the typical portfolio protector. They are very difficult to work with because their tight-fistedness with patents and IP means that everything they do needs to be negotiated and agreements have to be made between many different IPR holders just to come up with a new product.

    This is also why Matsushita (Panasonic, if you didn't know) is almost universally loved and Sony continues to put out shoddy merchandise.

    • Re:Matsushita Good, Sony Bad (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      AHH, People have got to stop giving companies anthropomorphic properties, such as Matsushita "the good guys" and "universally loved", like they're the local hero or some kind of good samaritan.

      These are big powerful companies that have a culture of profit. They are no better, no more human than the computer on your desk.

    • Well in South Korea Matsushita is not loved, since they just brought down some of their patent portfolio weight on a competitor (LG). S Korea responded with banning Matsushita products from being sold after LG complained that Matsushita's product infringed on their S Korean Patents. A brief news article [ft.com]

      Just goes to show you that even the best companies are still competitors, and will use their patents to their advantadge.

    • Brand name (Score:3, Informative)

      by phorm ( 591458 )
      I've found that Sony in general is milking a brand-name... but that cow is beginning to run dry. I haven't seen many sony products that - were they even the same price of their competitors (they're more) - I would buy on a quality basis. They make a lot of stuff that might be considered trendy. Asian students here especially seem to think Vaio is the shiznat, though really the last few of those I saw died sooner and generally sucked more than competitors (no, I'm not racist, my gf is Chinese and between her

  • IBM's Patent Culture - an anecdote (Score:5, Funny)

    by tfinniga ( 555989 ) on Wednesday January 12, 2005 @10:57PM (#11344877)
    I knew a guy who did an internship at IBM - I think he helped do internal IT for their boxes. Anyhow, while he was there, he was showing someone a neat trick he did with the init system on the linux boxes, so that it'd start up an interactive shell on a different terminal as soon as possible. The advantage being that if some process held up the boot, you could fix it (ie kill -9). I think dhcp was a big culprit on the distro they were using.

    Anyhow, his boss recommended that he get a patent on the change.

    So, I'm not too surprised to see them on the list.

    • The stories that you don't hear (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Anthony Liguori ( 820979 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @02:09AM (#11346013) Homepage
      What you don't hear about is that fact that to file a patent, one must present the idea in front of a committee (called an Invention Evaluation Board) which does an initial search on the idea and evaluation of business value, then the patent lawyers do their own internal search (before sending to the patent office), then you write up the patent with a lawyer (all the time modifying to take into account any existing work), then IBM sends the patent to the patent office so the patent office can do it's search.

      By the time IBM sends out a patent, it's already gone through an exhaustive evaluation by very intelligent people. Patents cost a lot of money to file. IBM has no interest in filing useless patents. And yes, there is a culture that if an idea seems at all novel then file a disclosure because we have such a strong process in place to determine if that idea should become a patent.

      And is IBM using it's portfolio to do negatively? Nope. Patents are a necessary evil. Any large company has to file patents to protect itself. Being that IBM is the largest technology company in existance (320,000 employees, revenue of $86 billion a year), it's only fitting that it files the most patents.

      • Re:The stories that you don't hear (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Halo1 ( 136547 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @04:10AM (#11346494)
        And is IBM using it's portfolio to do negatively? Nope.
        Yeah, right [ffii.org].
        Patents are a necessary evil. Any large company has to file patents to protect itself.
        By lobbying as hard as it can to get the broken software patent system as it exists in the US codified in Europe [silicon.com]?

  • Amazon? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by kaedemichi255 ( 834073 )
    Why are people still railing on Amazon? Other than the controversial one-click patent a few years back, what have they done? I just think it's a little farfetched to be putting Amazon into the same "evil empire" category as Microsoft.
  • Not even on the list. My, how times change.
  • 3,000+ patents.

    Does the USPTO have time to review all of these patents for accuracy/authenticy?

  • IBM: Patent Philanthropists? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Eil ( 82413 ) on Wednesday January 12, 2005 @11:15PM (#11345025) Homepage Journal

    No idea if this has been mentioned yet, but I ran across an article yeterday that says that IBM is donating 500 of its software patents [eweek.com] to the open source community.

    Here's hoping this ends up being more than the symbolic public affairs move it resembles on the surface.
    • If anything, I think that this article shows IBM's donation of 500 patents as a drop in the barrel (though a nice gesture nonetheless). However I do remember that there can be 2 reasons for patenting something:

      a) Personal profit based on royalties, etc (or preventing a competitor from reproductions)

      b) Not having a competitor patent something. You don't personally have to enforce the patent against somebody... but in the end it's a useful trump card (if somebody applies their own patents against you, you
    • Read this [silicon.com] for a different perspective on that.

  • This is why IBMs 500 patent gift is pure PR (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Zebbers ( 134389 ) on Wednesday January 12, 2005 @11:22PM (#11345059)
    While looking into this for a post [aspiras.us] on my blog I came across the same numbers. IBM donating 500 patents seems really lame when they got 1300 this year alone and have led the US for the PAST 12 YEARS. I know IBM is a linux friendly company, but they are still a company and they are still patent happy. Now, it could be that they are protecting themselves from other people patenting their technology but still, it is interesting. I made the analogy that IBMs release of those 500 patents is the technological equivalent of picking through their garbage: they obviouslly don't have use for it anymore.

    • Re:This is why IBMs 500 patent gift is pure PR (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Jonny_eh ( 765306 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @12:19AM (#11345436)
      Don't forget that IBM develops products other than software. Gasp! They develop hardware too! Hardware patents have been around as long as hardware has been around. I doubt many people here really care about them, and they aren't a threat to Open-Source software.
      It's those stupid little software patents that are the issue. IBM doesn't need to give 1 patent to open-source, but 500 is more than enough to be considered 'a lot' by my books.
      Don't look a gift horse in the mouth. If IBM wants to give you something for free, take it!
      • From the summary:

        IBM alone was granted 3,248 patents last year.

        That would seem to imply that the 1300 patents mentioned by the OP are all software ones (assuming that they've not really been granted 1300 patents in the last few days, and that he meant 2004)

        Seen in that light, the 500 (while doubtless still generous) are less than half of a single year's worth. Doesn't seem quite so impressive to me anymore...
    • Lets see here, IBM develops a lot of open-source code. IBM also develops a lot of closed-source code. If IBM wants to start using some techniques that they patented in open-source code (such as samba), then they are going to need to donate those patents.
      I like IBM, I really do, but they are looking out for themselves and their investers. It just so happenes that at the moment, they are betting on open-source.

    • IBMs 500 sw patent gift is CERTAINLY NOT pure PR (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Titaniq ( 310311 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @02:51AM (#11346193)
      It certainly is PR. If only because it got all media talking about IBM, its patents and how innovative IBM is. Much advertising at no cost (given that the donation pays for itself, see below).
      It is PR because a lot of free software users think well of a company that is apparently doing its best to support free software against the scourge of software patents. But how many of these do know that IBM has been and still is at the forefront of political lobbying for more software patents in the world?

      Making free software depend on IBM patents, and making the defense of free software against lawsuits depend on IBM willingness to assert those patents against whoever would sue free software developpers or users (see the IBM pledge : http://www.ibm.com/ibm/licensing/patents/pledgedpa tents.pdf [ibm.com]) gives IBM a lot of leverage on whatever happens with free software.

      Furthermore, free software has been able to compete successfully with Microsoft, and to contain to some extent Microsoft software power, a thing no corporation was able to do, including IBM.

      From an economic perspective, when two economic activities are complementary, and actually done by different corporations, each business sector will try to commoditize the neighboring business so that more money and profit remain available for its own activity. Commoditization of complementary business is also a way to reduce its control, and to be freer ans more secure when it comes to managing a business strategy.
      This is the case for software vs services, or for hardware vs software. IBM business is mostly based on hardware and services, and software publishing is only a minor part. But software stand between the two main business activities of IBM, and gives too much leverage to whoever controls software publishing, not to mention the profit. Supporting free software is a way of commoditizing software, and thus leave more control space and profit for IBM. If in addition it gives IBM some control over basic software (especially the operating system), all the better.

      So it is IBM best interest to actually get software patents and the control that goes with them, and to make some of those patents available to free software developement.
      But, mind you, it is certainly not a gift or a donation. Just good business strategy.

  • I have always been taken aback by the argument from my fellow libertarians in favor of users fees. If there is any part of society we don't want operating on greed, it is an institution that has the ability to back up its rules with lethal force and the depravation of liberty and property. Take a good look at what the USPTO is doing today and look at what it used to do when it was paid for with tax revenues only.

    I think there is a good libertarian case [blindmindseye.com] for why user fees are a terrible idea. I personally f

    • User fees aren't a libertarian idea; in fact, they don't have anything at all to do with libertarianism. The government - city, local, state, federal - all charge 'user fees' for a variety of different services right now, and I can't see anything remotely libertarian about any of these entities.

      I don't agree with user fees either, btw. I fail to see the logic in forking out an ungodly sum from my paycheck for taxes that supposedly support necessary government functions, then doing so again for 'extra' se

  • The reason Amazon/Microsoft get so much pub (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ZeeExSixAre ( 790130 ) on Wednesday January 12, 2005 @11:35PM (#11345133)
    The reason that Amazon and Microsoft get so much publicity is because their patents are often not really patents, or they're attempting to patent something that shouldn't be patented. In a word, they're not patenting ideas so much as they're trying to patent things we already do.

    The top patent recipients are actually innovating, leveraging their R&D power and making progress instead of leveraging their lawyer power and hindering progress in legal battles.

    • " The reason that Amazon and Microsoft get so much publicity is because their patents are often not really patents, or they're attempting to patent something that shouldn't be patented."

      Exactly! If you look at the list, the top companies are all hardware companies. That is what patents are for, hardware. The problem with Microsoft and Amazon is that they are software and service companies. There is no hardware involved. A patent for software that responds differently to a single click and a double cl

  • Interesting. So, how many patents does IBM have, all in all?

  • These patents were filed 3 or 4 years ago (Score:5, Insightful)

    by louarnkoz ( 805588 ) on Wednesday January 12, 2005 @11:53PM (#11345237)
    There is a delay between the time a patent is applied for and the time it is allocated. The patent office is throughly congested, and the delay keeps increasing. Nowadays, it is at least 3 or 4 years. The statistics in the parent article describe the patents granted in 2004. The corresponding applications were probably done in 1999, 2000 or 2001.

    IBM has been filing patents for many years, and has maintained more or less the same level over the years. On the other hand, four years ago, we did not hear much about Microsoft filing patents. So, their absence in the top 10 is not all that surprising.

  • Listen Before Cook Microwaves :) (Score:4, Informative)

    by flatulus ( 260854 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @01:57AM (#11345953)
    I can't resist mentioning this silly episode.

    In July 1992, I was attending an IEEE 802.11 meeting. The company I worked for at the time was making a major series of presentations - "coming out of the closet", as it were, after many months of revealing nothing whatsoever about their WLAN development program.

    At one point, the presenter (a colleague of mine) was asked, "Your error correction scheme seems extreme. Do you really think interference in the 2.4 GHz band is going to be that bad?"

    My colleague pointed to me (in the audience) and asked me to repeat a remark I had made during a coffee break, where I said, "Well, I've never seen such a thing as a Listen Before Cook microwave oven!"

    ("Listen Before Talk" was a new phrase coined by one of the committee members to defuse more silliness of arguing over the term "carrier sense", which had a somewhat different meaning to RF engineers as opposed to Ethernet engineers. I found the analogy appropriate -- i.e. "talk" :: "cook").

    I got a brief chuckle from the committee, but no mention in the meeting minutes, so the event was lost in obscurity.

    However, years later, I was searching for a particular kind of patent for a microwave oven invention I had in mind, when I came across:

    Patent No. 6,346,692: "Adaptive Microwave Oven". In brief, this patent describes an invention wherein a microwave oven "listens" to the 2.4 GHz band before turning on its magnetron, on a cycle-by-cycle basis, so as to avoid interference with RF communications in the same spectrum. I.E. "Listen Before Cook." The patent was awarded in 2002 to two persons (presumably) employed by Agere Systems, since Agere is the assignee for this patent.

    How's that for prior art?

    P.S. My "other" microwave oven invention had to do with "listening to the sound of popping corn" to determine when the pop rate was declining, thereby determining the right time to turn off the oven, avoiding the Blackened Redenbacher Syndrome. Sadly, I was beat to that particular punch -- a broader patent existed that covered "auditory feedback" in controlling microwave oven operation.

  • concentrate on what matters (Score:3, Interesting)

    by l3v1 ( 787564 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @02:37AM (#11346141)
    Despite the frequent publicity around Microsoft's or Amazon's frivolous patents, these two companies are not even on the list.

    It's not the quantity that matters, it's quality and topic. I mean, I don't suppose anyone minds when some company developes something useful and patents the stuff. I suppose the most of the granted patents are hardware-related, which -if it's so - I can highly appreciate and have nothing against. The reason so many people complain regarding MS-related (or Amazon, and the like) submitted and/or granted patents are the sometimes even ridiculous nature of what they seem to want to patent (just rememeber "ifnot" and the like).

    Eh, but most of you already know all this so you know, I just felt that I have to drop my 2c.

  • Patent crazy (Score:2, Insightful)

    by ZeroReality ( 842977 )
    They don't have 3128 good idea. What typical happen in tec. company is patent everything and see what pan out.

  • (IBM == M$) && (SW == HW) ? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by PurpleXanathar ( 800369 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @04:14AM (#11346522)
    IBM and Microsoft can be equally as evil really. There is no difference on who receives a patent.

    Now IBM politics are in favour of free sw just because IBM is now making money out of Linux and Microsoft is losing money because of it.
    Whenever it will be the other way around, we'll be all here crying for the evilness of IBM and how M$ could save us all. Really think about what could've happened if OS2 was the winner and Windows the loser.
    Probably what now seems so absurd could have been reality.

    Patents are evil, whoever receives them. And they are evil both for free sw and for proprietary one. And they are evil both for sw as for hw.

    We feel sw patents being more evil just because of the peculiar qualities of sw (being a product with almost no additional costs other than those of the creation of the first prototype), but really hw patents are as evil and sometimes as stupid.
    Check behind your Nokia phone, the Sim retention mechanism. Do you really feel that thing needs a patent ? Do you think its mechanic is so smarter to be granted a patent ? Do you feel that patent is much better than the "single click" Amazon patent ? [Don't know if it has been granted the patent and if it's still that kind of mechanism, the last Nokia I had was the 5110 and had two pieces of plastic with the simplest mechanic of this world patent pending]

    I think we, as a society, should reconsider the whole patent system. It's effectiveness is changed in its 200 years of life, and its dangers too. Patents were meant to protect IP and R&D investiments, now it's becoming a mean to convert ideas into money without the risks involved in production.

    Long post sorry :)

  • Big Blue Is Not Evil! (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Jahz ( 831343 )
    It seems /.ers associate the word "patent" with evil. Any company enforcing their patent rights is automatically evil. Well that is just a load of crap. It is true that the patent office needs to completely rethink its patent granting procedure, but without patents the global bussiness model breaks down and we all lose our jobs! That being said...

    In many way's IBM is a thinktank. They spend alot of money in researd and development of new technologies. For crying out loud, the PC owes much of its suc

  • Crazy Numbers (Score:2, Insightful)

    by PurpleWizard ( 643191 )
    Estimated 30000 or so patents just for the top ten patenters.

    No small (or even large) concern can realistically claim to have not infringed a patent for anything modern and nominally (or more) complex.

    That to me is the biggest flaw to the system.

  • patent madness (Score:2, Interesting)

    by happyfrogcow ( 708359 )
    Yesterday I noticed that a simple plastic bag had been patented. I was looking at the bag to see find it's recycling logo, and there it was. Some patent number. Now, this wasn't a fancy ziplock or super-ultra freezer bag with teflon air foils or anything. This was your regular grocery store plastic bag. Not even one with holes for handles. Just a plastic bag.

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