IBM Is First Company To Get 8,000 US Patents In One Year, Breaking Record (silicon.co.uk) 94
Reader Mickeycaskill writes: For the 24th year in a row, IBM received the most patents of any company in the US. But for the first time it got more than 8,000 -- the first firm in any industry to do so. In total, its inventors were granted 8,088 patents in 2016, covering areas as diverse as artificial intelligence (AI), cognitive computing, cloud, health and cyber security.
That's equal to more than 22 patents a day generated by its researchers, engineers and designers, with more than a third of the patents relating to AI, cognitive computing and cloud computing alone. IBM is betting big on cloud and other services, having spun off its hardware units like servers and PCs to Lenovo. The other nine companies in the top ten list of 2016 US patent recipients consist of: Samsung electronics (with 5,518 patents), Canon (3,665), Qualcomm (2,897), Google (2,835), Intel (2,784), LG Electronics (2,428), Microsoft (2,398), Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (2,288) and Sony (2,181).
That's equal to more than 22 patents a day generated by its researchers, engineers and designers, with more than a third of the patents relating to AI, cognitive computing and cloud computing alone. IBM is betting big on cloud and other services, having spun off its hardware units like servers and PCs to Lenovo. The other nine companies in the top ten list of 2016 US patent recipients consist of: Samsung electronics (with 5,518 patents), Canon (3,665), Qualcomm (2,897), Google (2,835), Intel (2,784), LG Electronics (2,428), Microsoft (2,398), Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (2,288) and Sony (2,181).
That's the wrong number of patents (Score:1)
Not 8086 patents? They should fire their patent lawyers, or their trademark lawyers, or both.
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You can't trademark a number in the US. That's why we have Pentiums rather than 80586s.
Re:That's the wrong number of patents (Score:5, Funny)
yeah even if you could I doubt there is a marketing exec anywhere that would think "80586" is a catchy name
That's why they came up with i7-6600K. Much more catchy.
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I can't be the only one that hates Intel's numbering.
AMD is pretty damn obvious. Get an FX (soon Zen), and pick the highest number you can afford in your cost/benefit calculations.
Meanwhile, Intel is "i3/i5/i7" with a number afterward (and sometimes a T, sometimes an ML, MQ, HQ, Q, QM, QE suffix) , plus Mobile editions, plus Xeon editions. 'X' Xeons, 'D' Xeons, 'E' Xeons. Plus VERSION NUMBERS (E Xeon v3, E Xeon v4).
Good God, Intel, get your shit together.
Take a look for yourself and tell me whether any part
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plus Xeon editions. 'X' Xeons, 'D' Xeons, 'E' Xeons. Plus VERSION NUMBERS (E Xeon v3, E Xeon v4).
Oh? Did AMD stop selling Opterons? Intel also has a much more varied selection, as they are for different purposes. You don't want a Desktop i7 (or god forbid a Xeon) in a laptop, as you wouldn't be able to effectively cool it. On the same lines, the i3 lines are for home or business users that don't need high performance chips.
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You're right, I'm not an attorney of any sort. However I know of specific cases where a trademark application was rejected because it's just a number. So I presume other things matter besides the number-ness of the application.
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You can't trademark a number in the US.
Better get this news to Boeing.
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History fail; IBM used the Intel 8088 CPU in the original PC, not the 8086.
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Why not just have made it have a 20 bit address space in the instruction set, or even better 24 bit address space, even if there were only enough external address pins on the early chip models to support, say 640 K, which ought to be enough for some people.
There was plenty wrong wi
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http://yarchive.net/comp/ibm_p... [yarchive.net]
Damn! (Score:2)
This is the very definition of Patent Industry. What we hear as a bad thing, is a Very Good Thing for the Patents Office.
And yet, this is such a low investment for these companies in comparison with the idea monopoly they generate... oh boy.
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Just consider that every one of these patents costs at least $10k for the company (the paperwork preparation alone is probably that much)... that's a lot of R&D dollars.... most of which will never serve a useful revenue-generating purpose (except to pad the resumes of the `researchers' involved).
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Psssssssst. Here's a secret: Patent applications are processed by throwing them into a room full of kittens that have rubber "PATENT APPROVED" stamps affixed to their feet.
Wait Till Next Year (Score:1)
It will be Over 9000!
Ha! (Score:1)
Violations? (Score:1)
Can anyone honestly say that: Samsung electronics (with 5,518 patents), Canon (3,665), Qualcomm (2,897), Google (2,835), Intel (2,784), LG Electronics (2,428), Microsoft (2,398), Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (2,288) and Sony (2,181) are NOT in violation of any of the 8,088 IBM's ones??? (and this is just for 2016!).
If they can't, then why do we even bother to have such a crappy system in the first place???
What what is this AI patent business? Are they patenting how my brain is determining what's b
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Looks like USPTO's approach is to grant all patents and let the courts sort it out.
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Us lawyers have to eat, bro. I see a lot of complaining about patents on Slashdot but never one concrete and TECHNICAL suggestion on how the system should be reformed besides the occasional crazy person just saying "kill all patents." The system works as best as any system made by and for humans can work. We've already greatly limited software patents (the Alice Corp case) and we've all but murdered design patents (the Egyptian Goddess case) and while some life has been brought back into software patents in
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Reduction to principle. Disclosure of working source code for software patents. Scale fees to company size.
Re:Violations? (Score:5, Interesting)
I see a lot of complaining about patents on Slashdot but never one concrete and TECHNICAL suggestion on how the system should be reformed besides the occasional crazy person just saying "kill all patents."
Plenty of people who complain about patents on Slashdot have given suggestions on how to fix the system, although my guess is your "concrete and technical" qualifiers is an attempt to set up a No True Scotsman defense against those suggestions. Some of these suggestions include:
We could limit the duration of some types of patents, especially software patents. Twenty years is too long for a software patent. Regardless of the merits of Amazon's 1-Click patent from 1999 should not still apply today.
Courts could be able to rule that a patent infringement case is frivolous, and create penalties against these frivolous lawsuits. The penalties system could be designed to be more harsh to larger companies and forgiving to smaller ones, and with the harshest penalties for companies determined to be patent trolls.
Damages could be limited to a percentage of revenue made based on how much of the product infringes on the patent. It would still be objective, but would be better than what we have now.
The patent office could perform audits of patents, and penalize companies who are patenting things which could be considered fair use. Number of patents filed per year would be a great red flag in order to determine who should be audited. A company filing 8000 patents per year could have a division of auditors permanently assigned to them. The cost of these auditors could be added to the patent filing, with no charge until your 100th filing per year (to ensure only large companies pay for this).
These are only a few examples, but they are my favorites. They might not be concrete and technical enough for you but they highlight areas where progress could be made.
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Exponential Costs (Score:2)
You make some good suggestions.
I would add to that.
Make patenting costs an exponential cost for the number of patents held by related primarily benficial entities.
Patent Renewal Cost = No Of Patents Held ^ 3
Hold 1 Patent = $1
Hold 10 Patents = $1000
Hold 100 Patents = $1M
Hold 1000 Patents = $1B
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How about patents not being renewable anyway?
They run for 17 years as they once did. For that period, the inventor has a state sanctioned and enforced monopoly.
In return for this, when the patent expires, it is made free to all. We probably shouldn't call it GPS as that is scary to the uninformable.
They only should be transferrable upon some shortening of the remaining period. 10% sounds like a good figure.
Example
In January 2020 "Bob" invents a new widget and immediately patents it - expiry january
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I will grant that what is and isn't innovation is ultimately impossible to quantify OBJECTIVELY in the same way it's impossible to define what is or isn't a fundamental human right in an objective manner that will encompass every scenario and be acceptable to everyone. It's a concept that cant be encompassed with a simple dictionary definition. It's too big. To paraphrase one supreme court justice "I can't tell you what it is but I know it when I see it."
That said, we've long concluded that you can't patent
Re:Violations? (Score:4, Insightful)
No it means what that person actually has a high ethical standard for what should be patentable. Just because an idea is slightly new or unique doesn't mean it deserves to stifle up the industry with a 20 year monopoly. Just because you are the first to see a customer need for something doesn't mean someone else wouldn't have also come up with the same thing within a year or two. The only reason patents are handed out by the government is to enable progress in the "useful arts" .. so I am not sure that patenting any and every slightly unique idea is going do that.
Re:Violations? (Score:5, Insightful)
A. In order to keep new, smaller, innovative companies from entering the marketplace.
Hope that was helpful. That concludes this tech support call. Please take the automated survey at the end of the call. Your call is important to us. Please enjoy this Justin Bieber 'music' while you wait.
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But did you do it "on a computer"?
Thought not.
That's totally different you see.
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Not something to brag about (Score:4)
Using the power of government to protect your shitty minor inventions and intellectual property, is not something to brag about. The headline should read, "IBM has 8,000 new ways to infringe on innovation and keep competition down!"
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To their credit, IBM whilst maintaining the world's largest patent portfolio, appears to largely use it defensively (as they did with SCO vs IBM). IBM is prepared to be the ultimate patent troll, but mostly if someone comes after IBM first. Their portfolio is comprehensive enough that just about any given hardware or software vendor is likely infringing on multiple IBM patents. IBM also knows that's bad optics and bad for business to try to sue their competitors for patent infringement. You might think
Thank you IBM (Score:5, Insightful)
IBM is betting big on cloud and other services, having spun off its hardware units like servers and PCs to Lenovo.
Thank you, thank you, IBM. You will finally succeed in killing off this "cloud" thing (a.k.a. somebody else's servers) because you have successfully turned the entire category into a patent minefield. When the Nazgul start sending demand letters these next three years, the whole thing will dry up and blow away. Nobody can stand against the Nazgul.
Tech site for nerds (Score:3)
Here we are a tech site for nerds.
Instead of articles about interesting discoveries described by patents, new and interesting scientific insights, or discussion and debate about technical issues facing society, we get...
IBM gets a record 8,000 patents in a single year, wow!
Atlassian acquires Trello (for $425M), wow!
Streaming is now #1 way to listen to music, wow!
LG threatens to put Wifi in every appliance! (They threatened to do this? The very cheek!)
Apple's IPhone turns 10.
Oh, but if you're not interested in an article, you don't have to read it so it's OK.
Re:Tech site for nerds (Score:4, Insightful)
IBM getting 8,000 patents in a year isnt of concern to techies? Nonsense
For those concerned about inovation in any tech field these numbers are terrible news but worth being aware of. It's essentially highlighting what many of us perceive as an ever growing problem.
LG including wifi on all it's products? Glad to now know that so i can avoid their products as i dont need the risk of malware on my fridge. Your average consumer doesnt care of even understand what something like this means. A good amount of this site's readership likely does.
Apples iphone turns 10 isnt worth mentioning on a tech news site? I generally have no use for Apple products but the iphone was a truely revolutionary piece of tech and marking its 10th anniversary is (while a bit on the light news side) completely in line with the site. (I just wrote this post on my phone by the way)
A quick tip, just because you dont find it interesting doesnt mean it doesnt belong on the site. I've been reading Slashdot since the 90's and it has always had a huge variety of articles posted to it and for almost just as long had people wanting the site to focus on just what they wanted. I remember the last time I addressed someone complaining about slashdot articles they were complaining about a "slashdot new low", an article about the Simpsons. I just replied with a post with about 7 or 8 links going all the way back to the 90's of slashdot stories about the simpsons.
Too bad most will never be used (Score:4, Informative)
I'm guessing most will serve to pad the team's pay packet and IBMs "defensive" patent portfolio that all tech (and other) companies seem to need today.
It's all just a giant bullshit bluff game...how many, if seriously challenged, would really turn out to be genuinely innovative, non-obvious, no prior art etc.?
IBM used to patent real stuff that went on to be built into real products - hard drives today all use discoveries made by IBM researchers, for example. Hell, when I was working there we had people who had won Nobel prizes working in R&D...
Nowadays? Not so much...sad.
Hey how super innovative (Score:2)
In a country where you can patent everything including a business model and a fart, this is no surprise. The initial idea (the one which was put forward) of patents was to protect the hard work of single poor and lonely inventor. However, it never worked very well for that purpose. In the last couple of decades it was completely converted in a weapon of big companies to battle each other in and outside court, and to protect them from smaller companies and real start-ups (not those money pampered "unicorns")
Why try? (Score:3)
Sold out (Score:3, Insightful)
IBM and others are looking at big money in surveillance.
Things like Watson were not built to explore or advance AI (though they may have had that effect). Watson was built to provide meaningful, timely answers using the giant pile of data various corporations and government entities are collecting on everyone.
IBM has had brain drain since Neo-Con management has taken over, gutting the company in a desperate race toward a Nike model where the corporation is reduced to, IP, executives and lawyers with outside contractors doing everything else.
I think, given who the IBM target company is, I feel our purpose is to be essential to our clients. - Ginni Rometty
Yes, but ... (Score:2)
That's Amazing! (Score:2)
They should patent it.
Big Whoop! (Score:2)
A way to fight patents (Score:1)
Not All servers.... (Score:1)
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indeed, I"m amazed people think "servers" == x86-64 boxes. Had a hard time recently explaining to an exec why certain AIX wares we use won't run on a machine in vmware.
IBM got itself out of the commodity crap space including Wintel PC's and intel based servers. No profit margin there.
Don't forget: IBM values patent cross-licensing (Score:2)
As we learned years ago from IBM's "Think" magazine, #5, 1990
The goal is 10,000 this year (Score:2)
If you're not growing, you're dying!